T.S Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination

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T. S. ELIOT AND THE DYNAMIC IMAGINATION

How is a poem made? From what constellation of inner and outer worlds does it issue forth? Sarah Kennedy’s study of Eliot’s poetics seeks out those images most striking in their resonance and recurrence: the ‘sea-change’, the ‘light invisible’, and the ‘dark ghost’. She makes the case for these sustained metaphors as constitutive of the poet’s imagination and art. Eliot was haunted by recurrence. His work is full of moments of luminous recognitions, moments in which a writer discovers both subject and appropriate image. This book examines such moments of recognition and invocation by reference to three clusters of imagery – around and across the borderlines between light and shadow, surface and depth, self and other – drawing on the contemporary languages of literary criticism, psychology, physics, and anthropology. Eliot’s transposition of these registers, at turns wary and beguiled, interweaves modern understandings of originary processes in the human and natural world with a poet’s preoccupation with language. The metaphors arising from these intersections generate the imaginative logic of Eliot’s poetry.   is a Fellow in English at Downing College, University of Cambridge. She gave the  T. S. Eliot Lecture on ‘Eliot’s Ghost Women’, and contributed a chapter on ‘Ash-Wednesday and the Ariel Poems’ to the New Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge, ).

T. S. ELIOT AND THE DYNAMIC IMAGINATION SARAH KENNEDY University of Cambridge

University Printing House, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Anson Road, #–/, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Sarah Kennedy  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published  Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Kennedy, Sarah, – author. : T. S. Eliot and the dynamic imagination / Sarah Kennedy. : Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, . | Includes bibliographical references. :  |   (hardback) |   (paperback) : : Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), -–Criticism and interpretation. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. :  .   |  /.–dc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/  ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

The intuition – is it something deeper even than that? – the conjecture, so strangely resistant to falsification, that there is ‘otherness’ out of reach gives to our elemental existence its pulse of unfulfilment. We are the creatures of a great thirst. Bent on coming home to a place we have never known. – George Steiner, Grammars of Creation, p. 

Contents

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

page viii ix 

Introduction    : ’ 





Immersion: Eliot, James, and Shakespeare





‘Hints of earlier and other creation’





‘This isle is full of noises . . .’



   :    





‘Vacant interstellar spaces’





Looking Backwards





Luminous Recognitions



      :   





His Dark Materials





Dark Doubles: ‘This ghost, this pendulum in the head’





Blood for the Ghosts



Afterword



Works Cited Index

  vii

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to Professor Adrian Poole, for his careful reading, intellectual generosity, and imagination. I could not have asked for a kinder or defter guide. I am very grateful to Dr Jason Harding for his shaping suggestions and enthusiasm; to Professor Neil Corcoran and Dr Robert Macfarlane for their thoughtful and constructive criticism; and to Liza Kennedy for casting her sharp editorial eye over the typescript. Any remaining errors of fact or form are mine alone. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to the late benefactors of the Rae and Edith Bennett Travelling Scholarship – this book would not have been possible without their beneficence – and to the Scholarships Office at the University of Melbourne, Australia. I am grateful to the many teachers, mentors, and friends who have believed in and encouraged my work over the years, and especially to Robin Grove, who set me on my journey into Eliot’s poetry, and whose wisdom and gentle humour is sorely missed. My colleagues and friends at Downing College, Cambridge, have embraced my research and have given me those great academic gifts: time and space for thinking and writing. My students have imbued my research with the energy of new discovery and granted me the benefit of their fresh perspectives. I am thankful for the support provided by St John’s College, Cambridge, by Claude Piccinin and by Brigitte and Frank Ciurleo. I was inspired from the outset by conversations with my parents, Beverly and Donald Kennedy, whose thoughts gave flight to my own. My husband Daniel and daughters Holly and Marina gave me unwavering support, encouragement, and forbearance; for whom, but for whom.

viii

Abbreviations

Where a quotation includes end punctuation, such punctuation has been incorporated within quotation marks. In all other instances, punctuation marks are placed outside quotation marks. All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ). Citations given without author are by T. S. Eliot, unless otherwise indicated. CPP Facs Letters I Letters II Letters III Letters IV Letters V OPP P Prose I

The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, ). Valerie Eliot (ed.), The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts (London: Faber, ). Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (eds.), The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. : –, rev. edn (London: Faber, ). Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (eds.), The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. : – (London: Faber, ). Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (eds.), The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. : – (London: Faber, ). Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (eds.), The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. : – (London: Faber, ). Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (eds.), The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. : – (London: Faber, ). T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, ). Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (eds.), The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. : Collected and Uncollected Poems (London: Faber, ). Jewel Spears Brooker and Ronald Schuchard (eds.), The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. : Apprentice Years, – (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). ix

x Prose II

Prose III

Prose IV

Prose V

SE UP

List of Abbreviations Anthony Cuda, and Ronald Schuchard (eds.), The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. : The Perfect Critic, – (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). Frances Dickey, and Jennifer Formichelli (eds.), The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. : Literature, Politics, Belief, – (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). Jason Harding, and Ronald Schuchard (eds.), The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. : English Lion, – (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). Iman Javadi, Ronald Schuchard, and Jayme Stayer (eds.), The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. : Tradition and Orthodoxy,   (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (; London: Faber, ). T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (London: Faber, ).

Introduction

How is a poem made? Where and how might we locate the moment of frisson in which something hitherto unapprehended springs into being? From what heights or depths, from what constellation of inner and outer worlds does it issue forth? Can it be sought after, or must it be bestowed? Despite the confounding nature of such enquiries, despite the impossibility of final answers, these are fundamental questions for poetry; even more so for the poet. Without the numinous intrusion of the originary, a poem cannot ‘live’. Without access to some source of animating dissimilitude, the poet’s literary offspring is stillborn, a mimesis without its own inner life. The new-sprung poetic vision is – uniquely – the sine qua non of literary creation. No other medium of human expression demands of its constrained and rudimentary materials such exquisite balance of novelty and precision: the uncanny perfection of shock and recognition. In Grammars of Creation (), George Steiner considers the interplay between creation and invention (‘those intimately cognate dualities’) as the central polarity of what he suggestively terms ‘grammars of generative imagining’. Arguing that our experience of the world is read ‘by the determining light of certain specific cognitive and innate categories’, Steiner intimates that the poet’s imaginative location within the metaphoric matrices surrounding ‘creation’ and ‘invention’ dictates much of the intertwined form and meaning of the poet’s work. The Latin terms creare (to beget) and invenire (to find) between them convene the epiphanic and the exploratory, the biological and the ambulatory. Invention’s twin associations with materialism and fabulation have historically rendered it subordinate to creation in the hierarchy of literary endeavour, stretching back beyond the Romantic yearning for inspiration to the Platonic suspicion of imitation (for what is invention – Sidney’s ‘true feigning’ – if not the fictionalisation of the phenomenal?). For Steiner, the uniquely resonant quality of the verb ‘to create’ stems from its typological source in ‘cosmic origination’, a derivation that lends to the idea of creation (even in 



Introduction

its debilitated post-Cartesian form) a ‘bright ghostliness’. Yet a sense of spectral habitation also clings to ‘invention’, related as it is to ideas of precedence and encounter. To invent is, etymologically, ‘to come upon’ that which is pre-existent but unrealised. Invention is creation’s shadowside, an intrusion upon and revelation of the adumbrated. Shriven of its most immediate positivist associations, invention might valuably be seen as entailing a countermovement into the obscurity of the past, to shed a belated light on extant but undiscovered topographies. The unsettling sense of recursion embedded within the texture of such a forward-looking verb makes ‘invention’ peculiarly apt as modernism’s presiding creative grammar. Anxieties over questions of originality, source, and influence had a resurgence in the first decade of the twentieth century, as elements within British literary modernism sought to define themselves in opposition to the putatively Romantic narratives of isolate genius and spontaneous creation that were culturally ascendant during the nineteenth century. In Original Copy (), his study of plagiarism and originality in the nineteenth century, Robert Macfarlane rightly cautions against simple narratives tracing nineteenth-century ideas of literary originality back to the heroic self-representation of the Romantic poets. Drawing attention to the Romantic poets’ allusiveness, social and political engagement, and personal ambivalence to questions of originality, Macfarlane calls on literary historians to be cognisant of the anomalous and the heterogeneous in their construction of intellectual and literary histories. With this caveat firmly in place, Macfarlane acknowledges that during the later part of the eighteenth century the topography of literary creativity was increasingly mapped via metaphors emphasising ‘a movement of thought from in to out’. This description of an imaginative shift from reflection to emanation itself openly mirrors M. H. Abrams’s classic typology of the constitutive metaphors of literary creation, The Mirror and the Lamp (), which charts an inwards movement during the eighteenth century from external phenomena (mimesis) to internal sources (genius). By the end of the nineteenth century, late Victorian writers imagined their civilisation as waning and degenerate. The literary imagination of the early twentieth century grew directly out of this enervated fin-de-siècle world, with its sense of aesthetic depletion and fear of ‘worn-out words’. Benighted by post-Romantic eschatologies and an historically justifiable sense of its own finality, Anglophone literary modernism eschewed grand claims to originality (Ezra Pound’s injunction ‘make it new!’ tacitly admits this) and privileged the survivalist processes of salvage and reassembly. Macfarlane observes that ‘modernism can profitably be read not as a

Introduction



movement preoccupied with newness, but instead as one obsessed with return, and ghosted by a sense of afterness.’ Recombinant theories of literary creation, when enacted as creative practice, are necessarily beleaguered by a sense of belatedness and multiplicity: they must invite in other voices as a condition of their functioning. They are, to borrow Auerbach’s magnificent description of the mysterious, fragmentary Elohistic voice of the Pentateuch, ‘fraught with background’. In addition to what Steiner terms those ‘elected presences’ whose voices are enlisted to create the collective fabric of the recombinant work, writers at the beginning of the twentieth century had also to contend with a heightened awareness of the dissembling nature of individual consciousness. Analysing the metaphysics of modernism, Michael Bell refers to the ‘legacy of hermeneutic suspicion’ engendered by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche (each of whom ‘turned human life into a fundamentally hermeneutic activity’). Michael Levenson makes a similar observation on a wider plain when he observes that the ‘inescapable forces of social modernisation were not simply . . . the destabilising context of cultural Modernism; they penetrated the interior of artistic invention.’ Modernist anxieties as to the permeability and contingency of the artist’s mind combined with an assimilationist theory of art to produce an obsessive and reflexive preoccupation with the processes of creation. Hence Pound’s interest (following de Gourmont) in modalities of mind and apperception. Hence, too, Eliot’s interest in mystical states of consciousness and the creative potential of the ‘primitive’ mind. Pasternak wrote that as the most immediate experience of art is ‘its coming into being’, the greatest works of art are really telling of their own genesis. Modernism’s metafictional self-examination foreshadows what Alistair Fowler calls the poioumenon of postmodernism: a reflexive and usually fragmentary text concerned with constructing its own process of creation. Subject to the pressures of the early twentieth century, the products of such desperate invention as Duchamp’s objets trouvés and Eliot’s ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’ cannot help but strive towards articulation of the traumatic conditions of their creation. The means by which they do this – so runs the fundamental argument of this study – is metaphor, both subject and determinant of their narratives. ‘Metaphor’ draws its etymology from the processes of translation and transferral. The Greek ‘meta’ (over) combines with ‘pherein’ (‘to carry, to bear’) becoming metaphora (‘to carry across, to transfer’). It is the anima of the transformation of experience into language, the means by which our ‘irremediably linguistic’ species negotiates what Steiner calls ‘the



Introduction

fundamental, generative collision between the elusive opacity of the word and the equally elusive but compelling clarity and evidence of things.’ Put more prosaically, metaphor provides a semantic and imaginative structure for speaking about the unnameable. An interest in the unspoken is at the heart of Eliot’s poetics: as he wrote, his poetry was occupied with ‘frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist’. Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal study Metaphors We Live By () claimed metaphor as the primary linguistic and conceptual means by which we achieve partial comprehension of things elusive in their totality. In arguing for metaphor’s bedrock status in approaching ‘fundamental logical, epistemological, and ontological issues central to any philosophical understanding of human experience’, Johnson went so far as to suggest that we are ‘possessed by metaphor’. Thirty years later, metaphor’s encompassing usefulness for understanding the rudiments of human thought is now recognised by neuroscience in relation to the processes of cognition. So the neuroscientist Walter Kintsch in : People are simply unwilling to be silent about what they cannot talk about – they use metaphor instead. [And] while [metaphor and literal comprehension] clearly differ in linguistic analysis, in terms of psychological processes their underlying continuity should be emphasised.

Scientific insight into the deeply embedded function of metaphor as a cognitive system of structural mapping gives further credence to Steiner’s provocative description (in The Poetry of Thought, ) of metaphor as a ‘mysterium tremendum’: the spark that ‘ignited abstract, disinterested thought’ in pre-Socratic Greece or Ionia. For Steiner, metaphor is the poetry of thought: It is not only language which is saturated with metaphor. It is our compulsion, our capacity to devise and examine alternative worlds, to construe logical and narrative possibilities beyond any empirical constraints.

Steiner’s words echo T. S. Eliot’s musing that metaphor ‘is not something applied externally for the adornment of style, it is the life of style, of language’. ‘We are dependent upon metaphor for even the abstractest thinking’, says Eliot, foreshadowing the connection Steiner draws between metaphor and the abstract capabilities of the mind. These otherwise very different thinkers share an apprehension of the phenomenal vitality of metaphor as an animating principle: Steiner imagines metaphor as cosmic background noise, whispering the origins of the galaxy, and describes the pre-Socratic philosophers ‘quarry[ing] language before it

Introduction



weakens into imagery’. Eliot pronounces that ‘the healthy metaphor adds to the strength of the language; it makes available some of that physical source of energy upon which the life of language depends.’ Perhaps as a consequence of carrying forward some trace of originary energy (its aura of incipience) metaphor is always dependent on that which precedes it. Its compound and accretive framing of referents relies on the ‘something before’ – the earlier and other – with which to relate. In this respect it is both constitutive of and reflective of the processes of literary creation. The creative tensions between likeness (inheritance) and unlikeness (variation) are typologically related to the likeness and unlikeness of metaphor. This is especially so when the cultural-imaginary context of literary production is agonisingly and obsessively aware of its own derivations. In his comprehensive study of metaphor, David Punter observes that in its inherent responsiveness to wide and overlapping cultural spheres metaphor is ‘a site on which similarities and differences can be constructed and tested’. Metaphor’s protean and relational qualities allow it to interact with ideas and images from variant strains of cultural discourse. This, in turn, as Punter has it, ‘brings something into being’. Many theoretical models have been developed to explain and categorise the generative functioning of metaphor. Multiple attempts have been made to articulate its gestalt. Lakoff’s ‘structural mapping’ and Hofstadter’s ‘isomorphism’ are exemplary theoretical ways of characterising the processes of coherence, recognition and creation that metaphor convenes. The Canadian poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky’s concept of ‘resonance’ provides a subtle characterisation that seems to me to come closest, in its lyrical fluidity, to tracing the phenomenon it attempts to describe. For Zwicky, concerned with ‘the deep epistemological structure’ of ‘thought whose eros is coherence’ and whose ‘characteristic formal properties . . . are resonance and integrity’, ‘metaphor is one way of showing how patterns of meaning in the world intersect and echo one another’: Metaphor is a species of understanding, a form of seeing-as: it has, we might say, flex. We see, simultaneously, similarities and dissimilarities. In metaphor we experience a gestalt shift from one distinct intellectual and emotional complex to another ‘in an instant of time’. A metaphor, then, is a meta-image. It is multiply resonant.

Are we willing to ascribe to metaphor its full range of significance? To accept Eliot’s formulation of metaphor as conduit for the energic life of



Introduction

language? If so, then seeking out the ‘bright ghostliness’ of Eliot’s work – giving attention to varying densities of its recombinant patternings – becomes a fundamental element of critical and aesthetic response, a form of participation. Not what but according to which pattern. Eliot’s method as a poet, writes Hugh Kenner, ‘was to collect scraps of verse written at various times until he could see a way of fusing them; and the principle of fusion was apt to be that words cut loose from a specific context can assume strange scope and range’. Eliot wrote in  that in contrast to the ‘chaotic, irregular, fragmentary’ nature of ordinary lived experience, the mind of the poet ‘is constantly amalgamating disparate experience . . . the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.’ This method is most obviously associated with The Waste Land (), a poem famous for its fractured consciousness, and one that concludes by looking towards ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’ (Prose I ). The publication in  of the facsimile drafts of the poem confirmed that the Grail/Vegetation God mythos – long held by some to be the key to the poem’s oblique structure – was a late-accrued veneer over a series of scraps and fragments. Less remarked upon is the fact that Eliot’s last major poetic works, the four poems of Four Quartets, are themselves something of an assemblage of fragments. ‘Burnt Norton’ () arose from discarded pieces of Eliot’s verse drama Murder in the Cathedral (). Eliot initially considered ‘Burnt Norton’ a stand-alone poem, and it was included as such in Collected Poems – (). It was only during the composition of ‘East Coker’ () that Eliot developed the extremely loose idea of a seasonal cycle of poems. The Four Quartets, like the cycle of five short landscape poems Eliot had written between  and , reach back to the locations and sensations of childhood imagination. They play on the reader’s recollection of earlier poems while consciously reexamining the processes of their own composition. Kenner’s description of Eliot’s fragmentary compositional process helps account for the ambiguities and recurrences that are a marked collective feature of Eliot’s poetry. In a subtle process of accretion and metamorphosis, verse fragments, drawn from acute states of feeling as much as from minute social observation, are cut loose from their initial context and allowed to float free in what Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes have called the poet’s ‘rattle bag’, altering and accruing until a transformative principle can be discerned that retrospectively tethers them together. Nothing is ever entirely new, nor is anything wholly left behind. The accretion of fragments is a

Introduction



defining characteristic of Eliot’s critical method, too: his prose is replete with moments of fragmentary, aphoristic brilliance. Fragmentation seems to have had a deep psychological appeal for Eliot, too. He wrote in , ‘it’s interesting to cut yourself to pieces once in a while, and wait to see if the fragments will sprout.’ All of this surely compels us to ask: what principles of transformation and integration are at play, and what makes them operative in the poet’s imagination? Kenner’s answer is that ‘transmuted by a title’s focus, all the observations written down at various times lose sight of their first bearings’. The transmutation is both more comprehensive and more mysterious than Kenner seems willing to allow: a title alone cannot account for the strange musical echoings apparent in Eliot’s poetry. To move from Kenner’s topographical metaphor to a nautical one, Eliot’s fragments slip their moorings and are taken by the currents. What these currents consist of, their sources and movements, is a key question in Eliot’s poetics that has yet to be fully addressed. Such a question, Eliot believed, occupies a perilous space at the limits of critical endeavour. In ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ () Eliot responded to an excavatory  study, The Road to Xanadu, by the Coleridgean scholar John Livingston Lowes: Lowes showed, once and for all, that poetic originality is largely an original way of assembling the most disparate and unlikely material to make a new whole. The demonstration is quite convincing, as evidence of how material is digested and transformed by poetic genius. No one, after reading this book could suppose that he understood The Ancient Mariner any better; nor was it in the least Dr. Lowes’s intention to make the poem more intelligible as poetry. He was engaged on an investigation of process, an investigation which was, strictly speaking, beyond the frontier of literary criticism. How such material as those scraps of Coleridge’s reading became transmuted into great poetry remains as much of a mystery as ever.

Eliot readily accepted that the process of accretion, assembly, and transmutation was largely an unconscious and unwilled one: ‘Mr. Lowes has, I think, demonstrated the importance of instinctive and unconscious, as well as deliberate selection’ (UP ). It was not the sources or selection of the amassed scraps of reading that fascinated Eliot, but the mysterious creative forces that shaped their transmutation – forces that must ultimately remain untouched by scholarship. This study attempts to get closer to the imaginative dynamics that transform an observation, feeling, or thought into recognisably poetic form by arguing for the centrality of metaphor as both outward sign and inward



Introduction

determinant of these dynamics. It excludes the material processes of drafting, typing, collaboration, and proofing, which have been examined in detail by others. Kenner, for example, situates Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Beckett in the context of the increasingly mechanised world of the early twentieth century, suggesting that these writers drew on the ‘most salient feature’ of the world around them: ‘intelligence questing after what can be achieved by a patterned moving of elements in space’. I take as given the importance to Eliot’s poetry of the industrialised cityscape, and seek instead to understand the interior action of elements and patternings that Eliot drew on in the creation of his verse. Like Lowes’s, this is a study of literary process, although it does not follow Lowes’s source-driven method. It makes no attempt at a forensic analysis of the material sources of Eliot’s poetry, accepting the truth of Eliot’s observation that ‘if the reader knows too much about the crude material in the author’s mind, his own reaction may tend to become at best merely a kind of feeble image of the author’s feelings’. I am not concerned with the ‘crude material in the author’s mind’ transmuted into a poem, nor with the biographical sources of the ‘dark, psychic material ’ whose appearance marked ‘the beginning of the process of composition’, as Eliot would later characterise it, so much as with the dynamics through which this material is shaped. In thinking about the imaginative genesis of poetic creation, we can draw a helpful distinction between the nascent ‘something unaccountable’, which cannot be quantified, and the metaphors through which the poet chooses – or is compelled – to think and speak of it. It is metaphor that provides glimpses of the abstract and the inapprehensible. This is not a study in the theory of metaphor, but a study of Eliot’s metaphoric practice in his understanding of poetic creation. Turning the focus of our critical attention onto metaphoric pattern and process yields new insight into the reflective ontological forms of which poetry, as a medium of human experience, is made. This study is an attempt to engender such a turn. Eliot thought a great deal about the internal alchemy of poetic creation or, as he put the question, ‘how does the making of poetry come about?’ (UP ). Writing of Paul Valéry in , he described ‘the puzzle of how poetry gets written’ as ‘insoluble’, adding that Valéry’s art poétique was ‘an obsessive preoccupation’. Eliot was no less obsessed, although he resiled from setting out a theory of poetry except – typically – in fragmentary incidental form. Yet Eliot’s critical writings reveal much about his imagining of the creative process, as do the surviving drafts of his poems. These resources form the backdrop to my analysis of the poems themselves.

Introduction



The poems are analysed for the ways in which their rhythms and imagery bear witness to the dominant metaphors of the processes of their creation. My method involves consideration of the connections between Eliot’s poetic and critical idioms, of the metaphors he imports from other fields, and of the resonances between Eliot’s poetic vocabulary and those literary predecessors with whom he engaged in an oblique and sometimes fraught dialogue. Shakespeare and Henry James in particular seem to draw Eliot’s eye in matters of the shaping spirit. The protean energies of the sixteenthcentury playwright were a continual – if often unacknowledged – source of anxiety and fascination for Eliot. So, in turn, Shakespearean linguistic and imaginative forms of play around creation and recognition form an enlivening undersong to the work here undertaken. This study builds up a gradual picture based on numerous works, in order to identify a general tendency towards recurrent metaphors of creation, and to draw out the presence in Eliot’s poetry of a self-awareness and understanding of its own generation. The Four Quartets stand at the heart of this study, partly because their creation has undergone less scrutiny than Eliot’s earlier poetry (much more has been written about the composition of The Waste Land). Scholarly interest is at present still focussed on the iconoclastic young poet (the ‘literary bolshevik’ as he later wryly noted) more often than on the Eliot of the s and beyond. Joseph Maddrey’s  study The Making of T. S. Eliot, for example, surveys Eliot’s reading during his university studies, as well as the intellectual contexts for his writing in the s, but concludes its analysis at . Robert Crawford’s Young Eliot () is (unsurprisingly) similarly confined. Such scrutiny as Eliot’s later poems – Four Quartets in particular – have received tends not to find in them the consciousness of their own generation apparent in Eliot’s earlier poetry or late drama. Yet the Quartets are self-aware poems. They speak eloquently of the poet’s struggles to find a new voice for things said before. Eliot’s poetic ruminating on the nature of the creative process gave rise to a series of recurrent imaginative principles that exert both opposing and uniting pressures on his poetry. The three examined clusters, around and across the borderlines between light and shadow, surface and depth, self and other, draw variously and interrelatedly on the contemporary languages of psychology, physics, and anthropology, situating Eliot within an early twentieth-century cultural and intellectual framework. The particular interest of Eliot’s selective usage of these very different registers resides in his interweaving of modern understandings of the originary processes in the human and natural world with a poet’s preoccupation with language,



Introduction

a preoccupation that encompasses the voices of the literary past. In an address given in Boston during his lecturing trip to America in –, Eliot defined what he saw as the limits of his allusive method, arguing that a transplanted image must be sustained either by something akin to its originating impulse, whether borrowed or spontaneously present (‘in the relation of word to flesh’), or by the agonistic energy of deliberate divergence (where ‘the contrast is very much to the point’). Although my focus is on metaphor, rather than the looser category of allusive borrowing, I advance several propositions germane to Eliot’s comments. First, that Eliot’s poetry (and to a more limited extent in the present analysis, his critical prose) exhibits a working through of the mystery of poetic creation, although this is not to say that either the poetry or prose arrives at a stable or definitive understanding of how poetry comes to be. Second, that in his concern to articulate the processes of poetic creation, Eliot has repeated recourse to certain clusters of imagery – the sea as a site of elemental transformation, stellar light and the entropy of ‘vacant interstellar spaces’, and the dark internal presence of an angel, or demon, in the poet’s own occluded psyche – each of which operates dynamically as a portrayal of process and pattern of movements. Third, that Eliot derives much of the substance of his metaphors from others (Shakespeare, Henry James, Arthur Eddington, Alfred North Whitehead, Roger Vittoz, Ezra Pound, and quasi-Jungian psychology) whose purposes or ‘feeling’ may in certain contexts be closer to Eliot’s than is immediately or superficially apparent. Despite Eliot’s careful critical distance from his Romantic predecessors, he instinctively uses an organic, Romantic language of submission to engulfing and transmuting natural forces in discerning the dynamics underlying his creativity. In his Norton lecture on Coleridgean Imagination, Eliot speaks of the processes of poetic creation in terms evoking geothermal force: A ‘simple experience . . . might lie dormant in his mind for twenty years, and re-appear transformed in some versecontext charged with great imaginative pressure’ (UP ). In his essays, lectures, and articles, he variously imagined the processes of poetic creation as catalytic, biological, quasi-mystical, and even agricultural (the Shakespearean age of drama was ‘a fertile field in which tares and fine wheat luxuriated’) (UP ), meditating on these analogies using the complementary means available to him in his parallel lives as poet and critic. The search for the right words to give form to the rude psychic material gave rise to the lines from ‘Burnt Norton’, ‘Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden’, where poetic language is imagined as the

Introduction



groaning timbers in the bow of a weathered ship, the shiftings and strainings creating a fraught music. While composing ‘Little Gidding’ (), the last of the Quartets, Eliot wrote to his friend Bonamy Dobrée that ‘my natural way of writing verse seems to require a long period of germination for each poem’. Eliot worried that in the conditions imposed by the war, he had been ‘trying to make poetry out of unseasoned material’. The image of unseasoned wood, which must be dried in order to be workable, functions differently from the moist fecundity of germination, but nevertheless intimates a process of change and maturation. Even in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (), Eliot underwrites his famous chemical analogy (of platinum catalysing oxygen and sulphur dioxide to produce sulphuric acid) with an awed sense of the unseen forces unleashed by a presence apparently ‘inert, neutral and unchanged’. In invoking a vocabulary of scientific transmutation, Eliot was placing himself within an existing tradition of writer-critics. Keats had employed the image of catalysis in suggesting that ‘Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect – but they have not any individuality, any determined character.’ Given Eliot’s apparent resistance to Romantic formulations of inspiration, it is perhaps surprising that in his  lecture on ‘Shelley and Keats’ he draws a connection between Keats and Shakespeare (based on the ‘deepest penetration’, ‘general brilliance and profundity’ of Keats’s critical observations), finding himself in almost total agreement with Keats’s critical pronouncements (UP –). In his account of the novelist’s art, Henry James elided the chemical and the gastronomical in terms recognisable in Eliot’s later, more famous pronouncement: an act essentially not mechanical, but thinkable rather – so far as thinkable at all – in chemical, almost in mystical terms. We can surely account for nothing in the novelist’s work that hasn’t passed through the crucible of his imagination, hasn’t, in that perpetually simmering cauldron his intellectual pot-au-feu, been reduced to savoury fusion. We here figure the morsel, of course, not as boiled to nothing, but as exposed, in return for the taste it gives out, to a new and richer saturation . . . It has entered . . . into new relations, it emerges for new ones. Its final savour has been constituted, but its prime identity destroyed . . . Thus it has become a different and, thanks to a rare alchemy, a better thing.

With a nod to James’s ‘morsel’, Eliot refers to images drawn from reading being ‘aliment for some poetic minds’ (UP ). Yet the image of the mental stew-pot suggests a comfortable poetry, nourishing, rather than profound. In order to get closer to the heart of his own creative process,



Introduction

Eliot moved away from the controlled language of the kitchen and the laboratory into the terrain of metaphysics, drawing ‘an analogy between mystical experience and some of the ways in which poetry is written’ (UP ). For Eliot, essaying the nature of poetic creation gave a particular urgency to the further question of how the poet may use and discard the language of the past in order to find his own measure of speech. During his year spent studying in Paris (–), he had become temporarily enamoured of the ideas of Henri Bergson in L’Évolution créatrice (). Bergson’s all-encompassing creative principle – the élan vital – brought together the forward thrust of evolutionary progress with the inexorable human urge to creativity. Robert Crawford has noted the continued Bergsonian presences in Eliot’s work, of ‘“prenatal dispositions” and unconscious memories smuggled through the “half-open door”.’ Even after renouncing Bergsonism, Eliot implicitly read the history of poetic language as typologically parallel to the processes of evolutionary biology, writing of ‘the struggle between native and foreign elements as the result of which our greatest poetry was created’ (UP ). These native and foreign elements included the ‘interweaving of Greek and native rhythms’, ‘rhythms of the language’, which, like genetic codes, are things indiscernible in the outward indicia (metre and scansion). The final meaning of a poem may be ‘something remote from its origins’. Poetic words and phrases, especially those drawn from older, established rootstock, must be allowed to come to ripeness if they are to be used by the poet (indeed, Eliot once described Shakespeare as having ‘started ripe’). Keats conveys a similar sense of the ambivalent harvest to be gathered by a young poet in his meditation On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again (). That poem imagines the language of Shakespeare’s play as an ‘old oak forest’ to be navigated, wherein the poet must ‘once more humbly assay / The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearean fruit.’ In writing critically of the ‘recrudescences of Shakespeare’, Eliot taps related botanical and biological images of dormancy and eruption. In a study that features widely here, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet (), Neil Corcoran writes of how Eliot can only accept the gift of a line by himself setting the terms under which he is willing to receive it. This is not rapacious, but it is not entirely benign, either; and in Eliot’s way with Shakespeare there is usually at least the ghost of something memorably characterised in relation to John Donne in ‘Whispers of Immortality’. Donne’s ability ‘To seize and clutch and penetrate’ is also sometimes Eliot’s way with the words of others, including Shakespeare.

Introduction



Part I explores Eliot’s relationship with Shakespeare (and specifically The Tempest), as a wellspring of creative and at times destructive energies. From early scepticism to a preoccupation in the s with the submerged oceanic music of Shakespeare’s plays, it charts Eliot’s gradual immersion in a Shakespearean tradition, and the ways in which his creative relationship with The Tempest was coloured by others’ interpretations of and preoccupations with the play. Henry James thought it ‘the rarest of all examples of literary art’, regarding it as the closest literary rendering of the creative force, as well as the primary exemplar of the riches this force can produce. Eliot’s comments on The Tempest, although sparse, suggest that he shared James’s interest in the play (if not his entire assessment of it). He also seems to have shared with the Shakespearean critic Edward Dowden a categorisation of the ‘last plays’ as a grouping that included Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Cymbeline. Eliot’s enthusiasm for the work of his academic contemporary G. Wilson Knight suggests a shared understanding of the spiritual dimensions of the play (as well as an holistic approach to Shakespeare’s plays). These three writers add their glosses to Eliot’s Tempest, yet certain aspects of his approach to the play remain resolutely his own, emphasising some energies and submerging others. It is, above all, the transformative potential of the sea-change that reverberates through Eliot’s poetry and critical prose. This leads to an exploration of Eliot’s intuition that ‘our first duty as either critics or “interpreters” . . . must be to try to grasp the whole design, and read character and plot in the understanding of this subterrene or submarine music’. It suggests that such figural structures provided an underlying hermeneutic complex for Eliot’s aesthetic and intellectual response to Shakespeare (and, by extension, other literary interlocutors). Eliot’s own poetry and prose reveal a sense of a submerged pattern of feeling, at once coalescing and shifting, as the poetic ‘centre of value’. The Shakespearean ‘pattern’, as Eliot understood it, is not an identifiable system, subject to explication or codification (in this respect it is distinguishable from an hermeneutic system). Rather, it exists at the level of an imaginative dynamic: a shaping spirit made manifest in the billowing movement of aerial and submarine currents. It is a pattern of motion, a process of ‘development, refinement . . . complication’, occurring in the individual poet as well as across the historical development of literature. In Eliot’s rendering, ‘pattern’ hovers, as metaphor should, between the visual, the auditory, the tactile, and the textile. Patterns, whether visual or aural, are only perceivable with a degree of distance. Even the tactile patterns woven in a carpet require a sense of



Introduction

difference and otherness between the hand that touches and the pattern traced. Eliot’s poetic focus on patterns thus forms a counterbalance to the self-surrender or even self-loss implied by immersion in an enveloping medium or element. Chapter  concludes by exploring the primacy of Shakespearean soundscapes in Eliot’s conceptualisation of the auditory imagination, expressed repeatedly as a musical pattern to be found in the metaphorical conjunction of sea and sound. In ‘The Dry Salvages’, a sea journey is linked to the production and manipulation of language, out of a submerged hoard of images. Shakespeare’s musics are apparent in a multiplicity of voices in The Tempest, some corporeal, some disembodied. Eliot was aware of this multiplicity, writing that ‘some of Shakespeare’s later verse is very elaborate and peculiar: but it remains the language, not of one person, but of a world of persons’. The pattern of movement towards a ‘lucid stillness’ in Eliot’s poetry coincides with what Frank Kermode describes in Shakespeare’s Language () as Shakespeare’s ‘increasing interest in silence [which] might be thought to mark a general development away from rhetorical explicitness and towards a language that does not try to give everything away’. Part II moves from the Shakespearean ocean to the light-bathed ocean of space, and looks to the role of light in its scientific and psychospiritual guises in illuminating Eliot’s concept of poetic creation. It begins by considering the place of astrophysics in Eliot’s developing intellectual milieu. Following the methodology established by Gillian Beer in Open Fields (), it analyses the lateral connections between astronomy, literature, and mythic imagination as disclosed in the Victorian debates about the death of the sun, and their later iterations in imaginings of the void within the atom. As Beer writes, ‘the contradictions between evolutionary ideas of sustained development and physicists’ theories of the dissipation of energy . . . gave urgent propinquity in Victorian thinking to apparently disassociated ideas.’ Anxieties about the slow cooling of the sun prompted a turning away from the harsh realities of a finite material universe and an embrace of various forms of idealism. Elements of the cultural retreat into mentalism (‘The theory that physical and physiological phenomena are ultimately explicable only as aspects or functions of the mind’) are still apparent in Four Quartets, more than fifty years after this particular popular anxiety had passed its zenith. My work in this field engages with two related studies: Michael H. Whitworth’s Einstein’s Wake (), a broad-ranging study of the modernist appropriation of metaphors drawn from the vocabulary of the new physics, and Daniel Albright’s Quantum Poetics (), which sees the atomic ‘vortex’ as a useful

Introduction



metaphor for a nonspecific but ‘focused dynamism’ inhering in the work of Yeats, Pound, and Eliot. The disembodiments of space run counterpoint to the corporeal concerns of biology in Eliot’s poetry. The analysis moves on to consider Eliot’s poetic rendering of light through the evolving medium of the eye. Nineteenth-century experiments on the eye fed into Darwin’s theory of evolution. The eye became for Eliot an increasingly contested symbol of empirical vision and its opposite – the inner vision, which may or may not reveal the ‘truth’ the eye conceals. The analysis extends from the eye to vision (in parallel with the poetic movement from depictions of the physical eye to psychological symbols of inner vision), considering Eliot’s wavering between imagining the universal aspect of vision (he once wrote that ‘Speech varies, but our eyes are all the same’), and an awareness of the propensity for vision to play tricks with the spectres and shadows of its own casting. Eliot’s conception of the symbolic and spiritual function of twilight, light, and darkness was informed by advances in the theorisation of colour at the emerging nexus of art and psychology. The poet of Four Quartets tends to locate the psychological action of the work within a twilight space existing in the momentary psychic threshold between day and night. A disaffection with the ‘twittering world’ and an immersion in ‘the violet hour’ allows the poetic consciousness to perceive the dark substance of the shadows lying beneath the surface of reality. The dusk world is given muted colour, complicating and elevating it beyond shades of grey into the realm of art and aesthetics. The ‘dim light’ that transforms the familiar world into an uncertain psychic space is the sensory precursor to the aphotic deprivation of the poetic underworld briefly depicted in ‘East Coker’. When read in relation to a mixture of Einsteinian and Dantean images of light, even this darkness becomes intelligible as the ‘Light Invisible’ of a spiritualised poetic universe. Part III argues that Eliot’s creative acknowledgement of the composite nature of the self is a fundamental dynamic in his poetic engagement with the literary past. Robert Crawford describes Eliot as himself a compound figure, suggesting that ‘at times he has been defaced, caricatured, simplified, boxed-in: because it’s just too difficult to allow him his multiplicity, his complexity, his life.’ In an attempt to restore Eliot to his multiplicity, Chapter  looks to the many self-doublings in Eliot’s writing, the internalised, split self of a modern consciousness in thrall to ancient ghosts and its own ‘dark embryo’. It begins by examining Eliot’s clearest statements regarding his own process of composition, those in ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ (), ‘The Music of Poetry’ (), and most extensively the



Introduction

Norton Lectures Eliot gave at Harvard University in –. Eliot’s critical statements, particularly those made towards the end of his productive years as a poet, acknowledge a vertiginous element in the personality and psychology that must be nourished, allowed to fecundate, and then retrieved. This embryonic image of the creative germ contrasts with the more conventional imagery of divine inspiration. Engaging with previous work in this area (C. K. Stead’s The New Poetic () and Ronald Schuchard’s Eliot’s Dark Angel () in particular), I consider the ways in which Eliot’s images of splitting, hollowness, and shadow are given form by the language and imaginative structures of depth psychology (partially filtered through the pre-Freudian psychology of Dr Roger Vittoz), despite the poet’s hostility to mental excavation and exposure. Delving into concepts of creative illness, the escape from personality, and writing as a form of self-composition, it attempts, in Karl Miller’s suggestive phrase, to expound on ‘the relationship between psychiatry’s fugues and literature’s flights’. What follows is a more detailed consideration of Eliot’s attempts at selfreconstruction (that ‘old man’s frenzy’ – ‘myself I must remake’ – in Yeats’s terms) through multiple incarnations of an alien self. It draws on theories of literary doubleness advanced by Karl Miller in Doubles () and by Marina Warner in Fantastic Metamorphoses (). The dark embryo, the hollow man, and the doppelgänger are invoked to explore the important thematic linkage between Eliot’s images of ersatz life and the hidden submarine self that strives to break free of the constraints of civilised consciousness by recourse to the rituals and rhythms of the dead. Inspired by elements of Hugh Kenner’s New Approaches to Ezra Pound (), I examine the Homeric elements in Eliot and Pound’s common project to locate the chthonic origins and past incarnations of language buried in the poetic self. I use the journey of Odysseus into the underworld to converse with the dead as a point of departure for considering the outward ripples of this encounter, via Pound, into the later Quartets. From these divergent contexts and metaphoric domains, a shifting picture emerges of the elusive animating and shaping spirit within Eliot’s acts of poetic creation, and of its relations with and resonance to its historical moment. Notes    

Steiner, Grammars of Creation, pp. , . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in NineteenthCentury Literature (Oxford, ), pp. –, .

Introduction



 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford, ).  Macfarlane, Original Copy, pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (; Princeton, ), p. .  Steiner, Grammars of Creation, p. .  Michael Bell, ‘The Metaphysics of Modernism’, in Michael Levenson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge, ), p. .  Michael Levenson, ‘Introduction’, in Michael Levenson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge, ), p. .  See A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, a Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. I: The Young Genius – (Oxford, ), p. .  Manju Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years (Cambridge, ), provides a detailed history of Eliot’s interest in anthropology, sociology, clinical psychology, and the psychology of mystical experience while a student at Harvard.  See Boris Pasternak, ‘Safe Conduct, or The Preservation Certificate, Part Two’ (), in The Marsh of Gold: Pasternak’s Writings on Inspiration and Creation (Brighton, MA, ), p. .  Alastair Fowler, The History of English Literature (Cambridge, MA, ), p. .  Michael Levenson describes the cultural insurrections of high modernists as ‘enacting a creative violence’ via a ‘complex of inventive gestures’. ‘Introduction’, pp. –.  George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan (New York, ), pp. , .  ‘The Music of Poetry’ (), OPP, p. .  George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (; Chicago, ), pp. .  Mark Johnson (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor (Minneapolis, ), p. ix.  Walter Kintsch, ‘How the Mind Computes the Meaning of Metaphor’, in Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge, ), p. .  Steiner, Poetry of Thought, pp. –, .  ‘Studies in Contemporary Criticism’ (), Prose I, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Steiner, Poetry of Thought, pp. , .  ‘Studies in Contemporary Criticism’, Prose I, p. . Emphasis added.  David Punter, Metaphor (London, ), p. .  Ibid., p. .  See George Lakoff, ‘Metaphor and Semantics’, in William Bright (ed.), International Encyclopaedia of Linguistics (New York: Oxford University Press, ), p. ; and Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (; London, ).



Introduction

 Jan Zwicky, Wisdom and Metaphor (Kentville, Nova Scotia, ), pp. L, foreword.  Ibid., p. L.  Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse (Oxford, ), p. .  ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (), Prose II, p. .  Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (London, ), p. .  Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (eds.), The Rattle Bag: An Anthology of Poetry (London, ).   Sep. , Letters I, p. . In a poignant counterpart, the aging Ezra Pound once greeted Donald Hall with the words ‘You find me in fragments.’ Peter A. Stitt, ‘Donald Hall: The Art of Poetry No. ’, Paris Review  (fall ).  Kenner, Mechanic Muse, p. .  John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (London, ).  ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ (), OPP, p. .  See, for example, Gardner, Composition of Four Quartets; Christopher Ricks, Decisions and Revisions in T. S. Eliot (London, ); Lawrence Rainey, Revisiting The Waste Land (New Haven, ); and Jim McCue, ‘Editing Eliot’, Essays in Criticism / (), –.  Kenner, Mechanic Muse, p. .  Letters V, p. .  ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ (), OPP, p. .  For which, see George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago, ); Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge, ); Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor (Toronto, ); Donald F. Miller, The Reason of Metaphor: A Study in Politics (New Delhi: Sage Publications, ); Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; and Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge, ).  ‘Introduction’, Paul Valéry, The Art of Poetry (London, ), pp. xi, x.  Letters V, p. .  Joseph Maddrey, The Making of T. S. Eliot: A Study of the Literary Influences (Jefferson, ); and Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land (London, ).  See, for example, Grover Smith’s discussion of Eliot as a ‘shaman’, based on Smith’s reading of The Cocktail Party. Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot and the Use of Memory (Lewisburg, ), pp. –.  The Bible as Scripture and as Literature (unpublished, ), Prose IV, p. .  Giving due account to Eliot’s own circumspection about whether ‘we can know enough about the matter for “working” to mean anything at all’. Prose IV, p. .  Letter to Bonamy Dobrée,  Aug. , quoted Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Art and Life (Oxford, ), p. .  ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (), Prose I, p. .

Introduction



 Eliot cites this in his lecture on ‘Shelley and Keats’, Prose IV, p. .  The Art of the Novel, intro. Richard P. Blackmur (; New York, ), p. . James also refers to ‘the chemical process of art, the crucible or retort from which things emerge for a new function’ in Notes on Novelists: With Some Other Notes (New York, ), p. .  Robert Crawford, The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (Oxford, ), p. .  ‘The Music of Poetry’, OPP, pp. , , .  ‘Mr. Murry’s Shakespeare’, Criterion / (Jul. ), –.  Compare ‘Little Gidding’, in which the first of the ‘gifts reserved for age’ disclosed by the ghost is the ‘bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit’ (P ).  ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ (), Prose III, p. .  Shakespeare and the Modern Poet (Cambridge, ), p. .  Henry James, ‘Introduction to The Tempest’, in Leon Edel (ed.), Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers and English Writers (New York, ), p. .  ‘Introduction to The Wheel of Fire’, Prose IV, p. .  ‘A Brief Introduction to the Method of Paul Valéry’ (), Prose II, p. .  ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Prose II, p. .  ‘The Music of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (London, ), p. .  Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (; Oxford, ), p. .  OED.  ‘Dante’ (), Prose III, p. .  Robert Crawford, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Daughter’, the  Warton Lecture (British Academy: Online Media Library).  Karl Miller, Doubles: Studies in Literary History (; London, ), p. viii.

 

Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

O, then began the tempest to my soul, Who pass’d, methought, the melancholy flood With that grim ferryman which poets write of, Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.

– Shakespeare, Richard III, I.iv.–

 

Immersion Eliot, James, and Shakespeare

In , Eliot wrote of the anthropologist and mythographer James Frazer’s ‘inevitable and growing influence over the contemporary mind’, due to his having ‘extended the consciousness of the human mind into as dark a backward and abysm of time as has yet been explored’. Eliot’s tribute to Frazer paraphrases lines from The Tempest, where Prospero expresses amazement at the depth and extent of his daughter’s infant memories: But how is it That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time? (I.ii.–)

In Prospero’s astonished phrase, fragments of experience are imagined as living presences in the recesses of memory beyond conscious and articulate awareness. Eliot’s interest in Frazer’s anthropological excavations is directly related to his concern with what we might call the past lives of language: the submerged, primal elements of poetic speech. ‘Poetry begins,’ he wrote, ‘with a savage beating a drum in a jungle . . . hyperbolically one might say that the poet is older than other human beings’ (UP ). Eliot’s critical writing similarly manifests a sustained interest in the discovery, transmission, and permutation of language. Although he was less concerned with the difficulties of direct translation, Eliot shared with Pound a concern with the metamorphic movement of poetic sound from the past into the present, as well as a sense that something elusive and valuable might be encountered fathoms down, in the oceanic press of poetic tradition. Eliot’s invocation of The Tempest in praising Frazer is not incidental. A Shakespearean topology correlating spatial forms (heights, depths, farthest reaches) with consciousness and meaning can be discerned in much of Eliot’s critical prose, as when he claimed for Shakespeare’s tragedies ‘a depth of meaning which Marlowe could never have sounded.’ 



Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

This chapter explores some of the more subtle and obscured elements of Eliot’s creative and critical engagement with Shakespeare. It argues that a reckoning with the patterns of Shakespearean sea music was central to Eliot’s creative/destructive immersion in poetic tradition. In this context, Shakespeare is understood not only as an overshadowing literary predecessor, but also – in a revealing elision of artist and art – as the consummate and consummating metaphor for literary creation. Eliot’s relationship with Shakespeare was immeasurably complex. Shakespeare was, as Neil Corcoran suggests, ‘a figure of central, consuming, protean and permanent critical as well as poetic concern’ for Eliot. In Shakespeare, and especially in Shakespeare’s late sea-plays, Eliot found a figuration of oceanic immersion and transfiguration that answered and extended his own intuitive concept of poetic creation. His interest in and approval of those critics and writers who most clearly read Shakespeare in metaphorical terms – Edward Dowden, G. Wilson Knight, and Henry James – suggests a receptiveness based on their confirmatory approaches. Of course, Eliot did not use the term ‘metaphor’ in relation to Shakespeare. Instead, he spoke repeatedly and with fascination of Shakespearean ‘pattern’ or ‘music’, both of which (in their dynamic figurations of contour in time and space) can be understood as expressions of the logic of metaphor. I take The Tempest as the exemplary site of encounter, and Ariel as its tutelary spirit, because it is in The Tempest that Eliot found the clearest expression of what he came to characterise as the submarine music of poetry, and the metamorphic ‘sea-change’ imagery of the play becomes fully absorbed within Eliot’s thought as a generating metaphor for poetic creation. Reading Eliot’s later poetry – ‘Burnt Norton’ in particular, with its yearning towards serenity, its fountains and dry pools – it is a shock to encounter the implacable river that opens ‘The Dry Salvages’. The glimpse of this raging entity, so quickly subsumed back beneath the stanza’s measured flow, is an irruption of a pattern that surprises with its presence in the substrate of Eliot’s poetic imagination: the driving rhythm of the torrent. Eliot was familiar with torrents. He had grown up in St. Louis, a young city subject to the seasonal rages of the Mississippi, where, as he said, ‘you experience the river’. The wide brown flood might suddenly ‘obliterate the low Illinois shore to a horizon of water . . . The river is never wholly chartable; it changes its pace, to shifts its channel, unaccountably’. Reflecting on the impact his childhood experience of the river had on his imaginative development, Eliot felt that ‘there is something in having passed one’s childhood by the big river, which is incommunicable to those who have not.’

Immersion: Eliot, James, and Shakespeare



In ‘The Dry Salvages’, the river is an overwhelming force, keeping the rhythm that surrounds and outlasts. (Eliot may have had in mind the dark inflection of the lines from Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes – for which he wrote an introduction in  – ‘Must helpless Man, in Ignorance sedate, / Roll darkling down the Torrent of his fate?’) Writing about Shakespeare’s sudden, unexplained withdrawal from the world of theatrical London, Henry James had asked, ‘What became of the checked torrent, as a latent, bewildered presence and energy, in the life across which the dam was constructed?’ What separates James and Eliot (and Twain, in Eliot’s belated realisation) from Johnson is their internalisation of the metaphor. ‘The River,’ Eliot wrote of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, ‘gives the book its form.’ As in the young Eliot’s sense of fluvial participation, in ‘The Dry Salvages’ the poetic self is a membrane contained in and containing the waters. Like James, Eliot associated the impetus towards poetic creation – at once uncontrollable and yet capable of being dammed or diverted – with torrential motion, writing of being subject to ‘an efflux of poetry’ (UP ). This is an imagining of poetic creation as a turbulent river, inexorable in the movement of its current, which subsumes the will and subjects the solid territories of accreted experience to a crisis of drowning or subsidence. As the poetic movement from river to sea suggests, the efflux of the individual poetic consciousness is but a small part of a vast ocean. The sea infiltrates and permeates: The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation

(P )

Following immediately upon the opening stanza’s meditation on the rhythms of the river, these lines unmistakably elide the pelagic and poetic in their ‘earlier and other creation’ (similar elisions appear in Eliot’s other marine poem, ‘Marina’). In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot writes of the literature of the past in a series of metaphors including the archaeological and chemical, but returns to the marine imagery of ‘currents . . . lost in the sand’. The essay advocates an immersion in the poetic past as a precondition for the creation of poetry: the poet cannot create with purpose or resonance without a lived sense of ‘the present moment of the past’, and a consciousness ‘of what is already living.’ Eliot’s understanding of poetic production is accordingly driven by the ebb-and-flow patterns of tidal motion: like the interplay of submarine



Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

currents beneath the surface of the waves, there must be ‘an amalgam of yielding and opposition below the level of consciousness’. Eliot wrote of the tasks of the poet in terms analogous to the ‘perilous adventures’ of maritime exploration: the poet must either strike out on a voyage into the unknown or else consolidate an existing poetic medium. His criticism articulates a deep dialectical alternation between preservation and extension; between the ‘times for exploration’ and the ‘times for the development of territory acquired.’ That this dialectic extends from the creative into the critical is evident in Eliot’s description of the tasks of Shakespeare criticism as a series of tidal modulations between elaboration, refutation, exposition, and recombination. Eliot presents both the creation and appreciation of poetry as a fluid pattern of call and response, of endless variation around an unstable theme: ‘our sensibility is constantly changing . . . it is not the same as that of our ancestors several hundred years ago . . . we ourselves are not quite the same persons that we were a year ago’. As a youth, Eliot was stirred by ‘antique woodcuts’ of famous ships manned by ‘Yankee seamen’, writing feelingly of the Ajax, a two hundred ton brig, entering Algiers under full sail . . . the Poor Richard, off the coast of Africa repelling pirates; the native feluccas very small in contrast; or the Samuel Adams, passing a sea-serpent in the Bay of Biscay.

For the twenty-one-year-old Eliot, passionately invested in this vision of the nautical past, Salem, Massachusetts, was a town haunted by the lost ‘hightide’ of its sea history, mourning ‘for the ships which do not leave and the ships which do not return. One feels that noisy mirth is a profanation there, the town is so populous with ghosts.’ His poetic explorations of the past took this distinctive imaginative form, cutting the bonds, floating free, and a faring forwards innately bound up with the ghosted idea of return. On completing ‘Choruses from The Rock’ () Eliot described the poem as ‘a venture on a wider sea than before’. In its movement from the familiar into the unknown, the sea voyage is an apt metaphor for poetic creation, standing for a complex of relations between journeying, travail, imagined destinations, and reimagined homecomings. The marine patterns of poetic exploration operate in differing directions and at varying depths: there is the pattern of waves, with their crests and troughs, mimicking – in microcosm – the tidal there-and-back-again motion of outward movement and return. There is the penetration downwards (‘full fathom five’) to the submarine sites of transformation and a sense, too, of reenactment as the web-like vectors of maritime navigation or the

Immersion: Eliot, James, and Shakespeare



unmapped movements of wind and underwater current create palimpsestic patterns in which each voyage echoes another (Odysseus, Aeneas, Pericles, Ferdinand, and Phlebas overlap in later poetic and literary accounts of their journeys). These patterns have in common a yearning for the unapprehended, the fluid, the submerged, and the partially heard (‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each’). The lost sea voices form a pattern of poetic creation, expressed in the musical undertow of Eliot’s verse. The oceanic energies exceed the boundaries of the poems to perform their transformations on the artist himself. Henry James wrote of the creative process as exerting transformative pressure on the artist analogous to the effects of sea winds and submarine currents: the artist is so steeped in the abysmal objectivity of his characters and situations that the great billows of the medium itself play with him, to our vision, very much as, over a ship’s side, in certain waters, we catch, through transparent tides, the flash of strange sea-creatures.

In Eliot’s ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’ (), the breaking and reformation of language is mirrored in the transformation of the artist under the pressure of past tradition: a profound sense of kinship or identification with a literary progenitor provokes a creative and existential crisis out of which a young writer ‘may be changed, metamorphosed . . . from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person.’ Although distinct in their imaginative shapes and intensity, Eliot’s creative and critical responses to Shakespeare were a product of their time. Intellectually curious and extraordinarily erudite, Eliot seized upon the work of those commentators who substantiated his own instinctive feelings about Shakespeare as an uneasy amalgam of playwright and plays. In order to understand the peculiar complex of associations constellated by the term ‘Shakespeare’ in the intellectual context proper to Eliot’s poetry, it is therefore necessary to outline some of the critical currents of the halfcentury of Shakespearean scholarship leading up to Eliot’s day. Victorian Shakespeare criticism tended to order Shakespeare’s works into a set pattern, from which meaning might be discerned. Gary Taylor draws the analogy between the scholars Frederick Furnivall and Frederick Fleay (key members of the New Shakspere Society, founded in ) and the scientists Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin (whose Descent of Man was published in ). These pairings all shared a methodical accrual of data in pursuit of proof of their hypotheses. Both groups held to the dictum ‘To know order was to perceive progress, and in progress would



Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

be found meaning.’ (Although programmatic accounts of Shakespeare’s life were not wholly Victorian in invention: in  Coleridge delineated five biographical segments.) Desiring to conform Shakespeare’s creative progress to a model of evolution that culminated in ‘an affirmation of paternal pastoral home-life’, Victorian criticism of The Tempest seized on Edmond Malone’s  discovery of the play’s maritime sources (as well as its appearance at the front of the  Folio) and placed it last in the sequence of composition. Having designated The Tempest ‘Shakespeare’s valediction’ and the ‘epitome’ of his career, the Victorian critical consensus was that Prospero was Shakespeare’s depiction of himself, the artistas-magician. Thomas Campbell wrote that the play has a sort of sacredness as the last work of the mighty workman . . . Shakspeare himself is Prospero, or rather the superior genius who commands both Prospero and Ariel. But the time was approaching when the potent sorcerer was to break his staff, and to bury it fathoms in the ocean . . . 

Edward Dowden’s ‘Shakspere’ () placed The Tempest in a new category of ‘Romances’, characterised by the ‘knitting together’, ‘reunion’, and ‘reconciliation’ of ‘human bonds’. Dowden viewed the play as an elaborated metaphor for human experience, which, in its extreme contiguity, ultimately approaches a kind of mysticism. He drew on the confluences of Victorian science and literature in New Studies in Literature (), describing the modern universe as imagined by science and portrayed by literature as characterised by ‘endless variety, infinite complexity, yet through all an order’. Writing of the new developments in astronomy and evolution, Dowden emphasised change and process: the ‘terrestrial and celestial alike were subject to change’; ‘the whole universe was ever in the process of becoming.’ He applied the same approach to his description of the four ages of Shakespeare, imagining the development of Shakespeare’s creative powers as a series of peregrinations through the stages of human experience. For Dowden, the earliest stage is contextbound (‘In the workshop’), after which Shakespeare enters a central arena of experience (‘In the world ’). From here, the patterns of movement follow a series of trajectories out and away from this nucleal point. The third stage is a movement ‘Out of the depths’, during which Shakespeare ‘needed to sound, with his imagination, the depths of the human heart’. His ‘genius left the bright surface of the world, and was at work in the very heart and centre of things.’ The fourth phase (which begat Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Pericles) is ‘On the heights’, in which a

Immersion: Eliot, James, and Shakespeare



‘supernatural element is present’ as Shakespeare ‘looks down upon life . . . with a grave tenderness’. Dowden concluded that ‘Shakspere in this period is most like his own Prospero.’ This overtly metaphorical reading elides text and biography to approach Shakespeare as a unified entity: it seeks to order and structure the emotional experience of the man and his poems and plays via the spatial cognates of height and depth. Given this, it is no surprise that for Dowden, Shakespeare should slip uncannily between the domains of the lived and the written: now as Shakespeare, now Prospero, but always inhabiting and bodying forth a set of paradigmatic correspondences. Although critical assumptions had altered somewhat in the ensuing half-century – along with a growing suspicion of the inexorability of human progress – Eliot was still heavily influenced by Victorian spatial and epochal understandings of Shakespeare. Like Dowden, Eliot was inclined to read The Tempest as a poignant depiction of long-awaited serenity and harmonious recognition. Those elements of the play that tend towards resolution, such as Prospero’s speech of renunciation (‘I’ll break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, / And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book’) (V.i.–) are emphasised, while the more jarring, unresolved elements (such as Prospero’s vengefulness and egoism) are submerged. This reading of The Tempest as the last, reassuring chapter in Shakespeare’s spiritual biography was not without its detractors among Eliot’s literary contemporaries. Dowden’s theory of Shakespeare’s ‘ultimate serenity’ was debunked in Lytton Strachey’s polemical essay ‘Shakespeare’s Final Period’ (). Taking as his test case ‘the one [play] which critics most consistently point to as containing the very essence of his final benignity’, Strachey questions ‘the tacit assumption, that the character of any given drama is, in fact, a true index to the state of mind of the dramatist composing it’. Citing the ‘virulence of foul-mouthed abuse’ that characterises the preceding composition – Timon of Athens – Strachey ridicules the notion that Shakespeare passed straight from ‘this splendid storm of nastiness’ to ‘tranquillity and joy, to blue skies, to young ladies, and to general forgiveness.’ Yet, despite his call for us to ‘readjust our view of the whole drift and bearing of Shakespeare’s “inner life”’, even Strachey ultimately arrives at the same working assumption as ‘the generally accepted view’ of the relation between playwright and play, ‘that the character of the one can be inferred from that of the other.’ In discussing The Tempest, Strachey is (like Dowden) moved to speak in a language of elevation: ‘Never did Shakespeare’s magnificence of diction reach more marvellous heights’. The ultimate difference between Strachey’s and Dowden’s readings of the



Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

play is their divergent attitudes to the play’s uncomfortable elements and grotesques. Strachey gleefully approaches both head-on, deriding Dowden’s blissful gloss: ‘In this land of faery, is it right to neglect the goblins? In this world of dreams, are we justified in ignoring the nightmares?’ Eliot too departs from Dowden in allowing the play’s strangeness to the fore, as in the grotesque ‘Dirge’, which imagines the disintegrative aspects of the sea-change with chilling forensic precision. Yet the Victorian’s critical awareness of patterns and sequences was intuitively intelligible to a poet who viewed the history of art as a ‘simultaneous order’ and whose mode of composition tended towards composite, self-echoing allusion. In concord with Dowden’s spatial metaphors, Eliot understood Dante and Shakespeare as existing on different metaphysical axes, the former vertical (depths and heights), the latter horizontal (widths and breadths). In his extended critical essay ‘Dante’ (), Eliot implicitly disputes Dowden’s hagiographical elevation of Shakespeare, but does not depart from Dowden’s conceptual terms, pronouncing that ‘Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; . . . Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation . . . Shakespeare gives the greatest width of human passion; Dante the greatest altitude and greatest depth’. Eliot contributed a chapter on Shakespeare criticism to the  Granville-Barker and Harrison Companion to Shakespeare in which his explicit aim is the development of a Shakespearean critical gestalt, as Dowden and others had made of Shakespeare’s biography: we should, I think, take an attitude which is represented by the popular word Gestalt or, as we might say, ‘pattern’ . . . [W]hat we have to study is the whole pattern formed by Shakespeare criticism from his own time to ours. In tracing this pattern . . . it should be the whole pattern rather than the individual critic, in which we interest ourselves.

Richard Halpern rightly sees modernist criticism in general, and Eliot in particular, as participating in a mode of ‘historical allegory’ (developed in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’), which both freezes and fragments the ‘redemptive flow of history, transforming temporal relations into the spatial ones of landscape.’ However (and unlike Strachey), Eliot’s spatialised Shakespearean typology maintained the momentum and centrality of a redemption narrative. In this, it received contemporary support from the spatialised allegorical work of the G. Wilson Knight. In the late s Wilson Knight’s Shakespeare studies attenuated Eliot’s reading of Shakespeare, providing additional metaphorical inflection.

Immersion: Eliot, James, and Shakespeare



Knight saw Shakespeare as the embodiment of the artist-as-pattern, a ‘principle of unity and coherence within apparent multiplicity and disorder’. He advanced a reticulated Shakespearean cosmology in which ‘Music’ and ‘tempests’ are . . . our most important symbols. Their interplay is the axis of the Shakespearean world. Style of verse, types of play, imaginative themes, ‘character’, veins of imagery – all pass in turn, alternating, changing, blending, as the great planet swings over . . . 

Knight’s rendering of the pattern is abstract yet sensory, removed from the strictures of philosophy by the use of musical and weaving analogies and symbolist allusion. Eliot’s characterisation in The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry () of Shakespeare’s images as ‘absolutely woven into the fabric of the thought’ owes much to Knight’s vision of the Shakespearean cosmos as a constellation of metaphors. Eliot reiterated and refined the spatialised understanding of Shakespeare he had first set forth in his  Dante essay, returning to the theme a year later, in his introduction to Wilson Knight’s Wheel of Fire. Eliot’s  description of Shakespeare’s later plays emphasises patterns of symbol and atmosphere more in confluence with Knight’s uneasy, often tragic spiritual narratives than with Dowden’s comfortable biographical dioramas: ‘reading the later plays for the first time in my life as a separate group, I was impressed by what seemed to me important and very serious recurrences of mood and theme.’ Corcoran sees in the self-echoing between  and  an alteration and softening of Eliot’s critical position towards Shakespeare, thanks to his admission in the later piece that between Dante and Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s is the more complex pattern. Yet even in the earlier essay, Eliot concedes that Shakespeare’s is ‘a larger pattern than Dante’s’. The fact that it is also ‘less distinct’ should not be read casually as a dismissal, especially as Eliot concludes the  essay by expressing his sense of ‘the equality of the two men.’ Organic systems and patterns are permeable in a way that fixed texts are not. The metaphorised view of Shakespeare as a constellation of human and textual patterns – a Shakespearean gestalt – discloses an irresistibly rich and immersive, albeit perilous, space for a young poet’s imaginative habitation. The further effect of the Victorian tendency towards Shakespearean psycho-biography, then, is that it promoted and justified in Eliot a complex form of identification with (and rejection of ) Shakespeare, which he struggled with for most of his adult life. The difficult poetic interrelationship between Eliot and Shakespeare has been subject to sustained critical analysis, although this has largely been concerned to explain

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Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

or justify Eliot’s seeming reluctance as a critic to engage with Shakespeare. Eliot was wary of direct engagement with Shakespeare. He published only two full-length essays devoted to Shakespeare: the rather disparaging ‘Hamlet and His Problems’ (), and ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ (). As Hugh Grady suggests, Eliot’s critical influence on Shakespeare criticism ‘had little to do’ with his published remarks on Shakespeare, and stemmed instead ‘from the margins’ of his criticism. Beyond his occasional book reviews, Eliot’s discussions of Shakespeare occur in relatively obscure contexts: in several introductions he wrote – including for Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire – and in two unpublished lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in  (titled ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse’). As Corcoran writes, ‘it is peculiarly of a piece with the almost fugitive nature of Eliot’s work on Shakespeare that what might have amounted to a major statement should remain unpublished and, in effect, unfinished’. Corcoran’s Shakespeare and the Modern Poet () provides a recent and thorough study of the ‘rich, stimulating and provocative dispersal of individual readings and aperçus’ that form Eliot’s fragmentary Shakespeare criticism. By , Eliot was able to acknowledge the deep extent of Shakespeare’s influence on the English language, and that Shakespeare, in his time, ‘made the language new’. Yet Eliot’s Shakespeare is a divided figure, the model of a pioneering and revivifying wellspring of artistry whose very success and value renders him antagonistic to future generations of writers. This ambiguity is apparent in Eliot’s statement that we ‘often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of . . . [a poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.’ Corcoran argues persuasively that early in his career Eliot found in Shakespeare the foreclosure of opportunity, and that in avoiding prolonged critical treatment of Shakespeare he was ‘protecting himself as a poet’. Given Eliot’s comments in ‘To Criticize the Critic’ () regarding the sterilising effect on a young poet of a writer of the greatness and imaginative stature of Shakespeare, this explanation seems correct. (Eliot had previously written that ‘Dante can do less harm to anyone trying to learn to write verse, than can Shakespeare’.) Despite (or perhaps because of ) his hesitation, the figure of Shakespeare occupies a central position in Eliot’s brooding struggle for poetic articulation. As a young critic, it was Shakespeare that Eliot attacked for the ‘buffoonery’ inherent in his inability to ‘drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art’ the substance of his emotion. I am not alone in suspecting this statement to be an unwitting act of transference. Corcoran provides a

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nuanced reading of ‘Hamlet and His Problems’ (), where this criticism appears as ‘a painful form of obliquity’ in which Eliot makes Shakespeare ‘a function of his own personal and artistic desire or demand’. In ‘The Poetic Drama’ (), Eliot imagines ‘the feeling and the shuddering personal experience of Shakespeare’, a still point amidst the noise and magnificent squalor of a seventeenth-century playhouse pit, moving ‘solitary and unsoiled; solitary and free as the thought of Spinoza in his study or Montaigne in his tower.’ In an essay on Eliot’s ‘shudder’, Frank Kermode draws attention to Darwin’s observations on the physiology of the shudder, described in Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals () as ‘Surprise–Astonishment–Fear–Horror’, and wonders at Eliot’s strange assurance in describing Shakespeare’s experience with such visceral subjectivity. The identification is so intimate, the language so reminiscent of Eliot’s own meditations (‘the spirit unappeased and peregrine’), that it is a shock to realise that Eliot’s description was written during a time when he was resolutely (and exhaustedly, as the strange slippage in the phrase suggests) resisting ‘the constricting toils’ of Shakespearean influence. Eliot’s repeated use of ‘solitary’ in this passage suggests an element of wishful self-projection by a harried young poet pursuing a career at Lloyds Bank by day and his literary journalism of an evening, but it also speaks to a desire to be free of insistent attendance by a throng of literary ghosts. We might feel that Eliot overreaches when he grasps towards Shakespeare’s shuddering consciousness, as it is precisely this individualised consciousness that is lost to history, were it not for the place that Eliot implicitly accords Shakespeare as a numinous yet intimate metaphor for the poet’s experience of poesis. In his introduction to The Tempest for the  Sidney Lee edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Henry James writes of the plays – and particularly The Tempest – in metaphors of veiled nativity: they ‘mock our persistent ignorance of so many of the conditions of their birth’; ‘no poetic birth ever took place under a star appointed to blaze upon it so steadily’. Similarly haunted by the gap, Eliot wrote in : It is not only the external history of Shakespeare’s life that is deficient. It is that internal history, which may have much or may have little relation to external facts, that internal crisis over which our imagination is tempted to brood too long – it is this that we shall never know.

Yet it is precisely such sense of occlusion that estranges Shakespeare from the constraints of biography, allowing him to be translated into a figure of such manifold resonance.

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Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

As his brooding interest in Shakespeare’s ‘internal crisis’ suggests, Eliot’s critical appreciation of Shakespeare underwent a series of gradual changes from early wariness to mature fascination. Eliot’s  introduction to Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire demonstrates a pivotal ripening of his critical attitudes to Shakespeare. This was mirrored in his creative response: it was during this period that Eliot composed ‘Marina’, a poem that echoes the pain and joy of recognition felt by Pericles in his discovery of his lost daughter. Corcoran describes the poem as ‘a tissue or patchwork’ of lexical recurrence, laden with the seas and shorelines, parent and child, wind and wave, eyes, breath, and pulse that endow Pericles with its distinctive music. In his  essay on Yeats, Eliot finds ‘something miraculous’ in the continuing evolution of Shakespeare’s craft, as well as the sense in which his mastery is always yearning towards a further completion. When, three years before his death, Eliot wrote the preface to the volume of essays on Elizabethan Dramatists (), he sought to measure his own growth in relation to the contours of Shakespeare’s miraculous inexhaustibility: ‘for the understanding of Shakespeare, a lifetime is not too long; and of Shakespeare, the development of one’s opinions may be the measure of one’s development in wisdom’. This attitudinal sea-change (and loosing of primal ‘energies’ in his later Shakespeare criticism and poetic production) emerged gradually from the late s onwards. It developed through – and took the form of – an imaginative immersion in the Shakespearean element. Of Shakespeare’s plays, The Tempest obtrudes most insistently in Eliot’s work. The play’s particularly rich afterlife in Eliot accords with the peculiar power exerted by the play’s elemental and often savage imagery over poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Russ McDonald links the play’s reiterative logic to its ‘profound concern with reproduction, in various senses from the biological to the political.’ This concern manifests intratextually to create multiple repetitions and self-echoings as well as in the vigour and longevity of its presence in other texts. One reason for its resonance is that the dramatic action of The Tempest encompasses many varieties of movement and change. Its unfolding metamorphoses may be real (such as Alonso’s repentance and joyful wonder at the return of his lost son) or imagined (Caliban’s transformation from fish to islander in Trinculo’s inebriated perception). They may be conjured or wrought only in words, as when, through Ariel’s song, Ferdinand sees his dead father giving osseous root to coral islands. Some changes are imputed, seemingly without justification, as when Prospero confidently assumes the penitence of

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Antonio and Sebastian. Some are foreshadowed without materialising, as in Prospero’s renunciation of his magic, while some are actual but imperilled, such as Miranda’s ‘O brave new world, / That has such people in’t!’, darkened by Prospero’s quiet rejoinder ‘’Tis new to thee’ (V.i.–). Ariel is the embodiment of the play’s animating principle of metamorphic possibility, realised in his ability to change shape and scale, to move in the spaces between the senses (becoming invisible or inaudible at will), and to mediate between different planes of existence (the human, the animal, the fairy, and – through the medium of the masque – the divine). Eliot’s assimilative imagination did not easily lend itself to direct forms of influence. His struggle with The Tempest and its author is the modern poet’s struggle to both claim and disown his creative inheritance – to hear the play’s submarine music, and to make it his own. The Tempest encompasses questions about the nature and use of art, as well as exploring some of the risks and difficulties of inherited language and immersion in a preexisting tradition. As Sarah Annes Brown observes, ‘the play already seems . . . to be haunted by itself’. Caliban, having inherited his mother’s devalued island knowledge, is faced with a new idiom, conveyed to him by Prospero, who wields it artfully and oppressively. Caliban’s resistance to Prospero’s influence (‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!’) (I.ii.–) suggests itself as an instance of what Eliot calls the ‘sterilising’ effect of influence; although – significantly – Caliban is not ultimately constrained in his cursing by Prospero’s more cultivated, patrician language. With its encapsulating metaphor of immersive transformation (the ‘sea-change’), The Tempest forms a point of imaginative and aural reference from which Eliot drew some of the richest substance of his imagery, as well as the strophic word-patterning of his recurring sea rhythms (what Frank Kermode, writing of Shakespeare, calls ‘their chimings and interchimings, their repetition’). Previous scholarship has commonly focused on the relationship between The Tempest and The Waste Land, where lines from The Tempest most famously and most recognisably appear. When Madame Sosostris reads the Tarot in ‘The Burial of the Dead’ she finds the querent’s card is ‘the drowned Phoenician Sailor, / (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)’. Later, in ‘The Fire Sermon’, a figure sits by a canal ‘Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck / And on the king my father’s death before him’, recalling Ferdinand’s solitary storm-tossed grief at the believed loss of his father in The Tempest:

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Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest Sitting on a bank, Weeping again the King my father’s wreck, This music crept by me upon the waters . . . (I.ii.–)

The same scene is evoked further on in the passage by Eliot’s direct appropriation of the line ‘This music crept by me upon the waters’. The ‘music’ Ferdinand refers to is, of course, Ariel’s song of submarine metamorphosis: Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. (I.ii.–)

Corcoran reads the presence of Ariel’s song in The Waste Land as ‘a kind of repeated undersong’ implying ‘the presence of a ghostly, skeletal or attenuated narrative.’ The association is now so well known that Frank Kermode has been moved to reverse the echo, suggesting that modern readers can hardly fail to associate Ferdinand’s ‘perfect speech . . . of mourning and music . . . with Eliot and The Waste Land.’ In his annotations to Eliot’s juvenilia, Ricks tantalisingly remarks that the phrase ‘rich and strange’ ‘haunted TSE, not only in The Waste Land’, but does not elaborate. The remark presumably refers to ‘Dirge’ (c. ), a discarded fragment of the draft of The Waste Land in which Bleistein replaces Alonso as the drowned figure, in what Jason Harding rightly describes as a ‘travesty of Ariel’s Song . . . Eliot’s nastiest despoliation of Shakespeare’s verse’. Yet Eliot’s imaginative response to the play extends beyond its palpable presence in The Waste Land. The Tempest inhabits Eliot’s imagination as a metaphor of poetic creativity. Its pervasive influence, giving dynamic form to Eliot’s conception of literary creation, can be likened to the presence of the playwright in Shakespeare’s plays (as Eliot described it): ‘The world of a great poetic dramatist is a world in which the creator is everywhere present, and everywhere hidden’. As a young poet, Eliot was willing to make explicit reference to Hamlet (‘I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be’) (P ). The Tempest’s significant presence in Eliot’s writing is mostly submerged. Eliot himself acknowledged in  that the greatest debts ‘are not always the most evident’. The Tempest’s sonorous presence throughout Eliot’s writing is most clearly identified by the recurrent

Immersion: Eliot, James, and Shakespeare



iconography of the sea-change. In ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ Eliot provides a description of Shakespeare as the consummate poet, subject to the deep surge and miraculous transformations of his own oceanic creativity: [He] was occupied with the struggle – which alone constitutes life for a poet – to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal . . . the deep surge of Shakespeare’s general cynicism and disillusionment, are merely gigantic attempts to metamorphose private failings and disappointments.

The almost casual use of Ariel’s words is evidence of their deep penetration into Eliot’s thought, as if he struggles to imagine profound metamorphosis in any other terms. Referring in  to the line ‘Full fathom five thy father lies’, he found that he understood it ‘without explanation’, and that the words gave him ‘as keen a thrill when I repeat them today as they did fifty years ago’. We might think of this as a luminous recognition, an instance of what Jan Zwicky calls lyrical (transhistorical) intuition ‘unmediated by human language.’ For Zwicky, ‘the difference . . . between lyric memory and narrative memory can be cast as the difference between witness and explanation.’ The language of The Tempest catches at the motion of the wind and the waves. It is a sea play, soaked in a language of the elements in a way that even Macbeth, with its eldritch earthiness, is not. For a poet who writes of poetry in the language of ‘living things’, speaking of ‘laws of growth’, and likening the inexorable flow of words to the ‘winds’, ‘rains’ and ‘seasons’, The Tempest is the most elementally distinct of Shakespeare’s plays. Distinct, partly because its setting is so unremittingly strange (neither the sylvan softness of A Midsummer Night’s Dream nor the intermittent wind-strewn wildness of King Lear’s heath and cliff can compare), but also because the foregrounded elements (sea and air) are in constant motion. Eliot’s sensory responsiveness to Shakespeare has the answering quality of deeply embedded memory. (Zwicky’s characterisation of ‘memory as wilderness, as the raw music of experience’ is instructive here.) Shakespeare’s sea plays – Pericles and The Tempest – with their ‘new-minted maritime dialect’, came to exemplify a music of allusion calling up dormant images from the mind and exerting great transformative pressure. Eliot’s meditations for the Quartets took him from the ‘nursery bedroom’ to the ‘heaving groaners’ of the New England coast to the ‘other places’ of ‘Little Gidding’. The sounds of the sea and images of shorelines littered with ‘hints of earlier and other creation’ had a ‘personal saturation value’

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Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

(UP –) for the poet who spent his childhood summers on the Gloucester shoreline and his adolescent holidays sailing off the Massachusetts coast. These memories provided an answering mythology to Shakespeare’s seascapes, as is apparent in Eliot’s description of ‘a small boy peering through sea-water in a rock-pool . . . finding a sea-anemone for the first time: the simple experience . . . might lie dormant in his mind for twenty years, and re-appear transformed in some verse-context charged with great imaginative pressure’ (UP –). The memory surfaces in ‘The Dry Salvages’, where the sea reaches into rock pools to deposit algae and anemones (P ). Eliot’s imaginative saturation in Shakespeare’s submarine music can be traced even in his early poetry. ‘Mr. Apollinax’ () is possessed of laughter: . . . submarine and profound Like the old man of the sea’s Hidden under coral islands Where worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence.

(P )

The collocation of sea, coral, and drowned men irresistibly recalls the ‘seachange’ of Ariel’s song, with its ‘bones’ made ‘coral’ and its ‘eyes’ made ‘pearl’. The wave-worried bodies that drop ‘from fingers of surf’ make clear that the cavernous space under ‘coral islands’ receives the carrion of shipwrecks and tempests. The poem conveys a transformative marine silence that accords with Eliot’s own feelings regarding the ocean. Writing to Conrad Aiken in  (a year or so after writing ‘Mr. Apollinax’), Eliot yearned for ‘a submarine world of clear green light’. In  Eliot wrote to Bertrand Russell (Apollinax himself ) describing a rapturous experience at Torquay: the water [was] that peculiar clear green blue which I have never seen anywhere else. I was in raptures over it. An atmosphere of perfect peace that nothing but the ocean has. It is wonderful to have come out of town and been bathed in this purity.

In its evocation of preternatural laughter amid coral islands, ‘Mr. Apollinax’ calls up Caliban’s ‘The isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not’ (III.ii.–). Although the old man of the sea predates Shakespeare, Eliot depicts him as a hybrid of Prospero and Sycorax, the evasive marine patriarch and the sea witch whose shaded realm is the greening silence of the kelp forest. The Homeric association of the old man of the sea with the shape-shifting sea god Proteus emphasises

Immersion: Eliot, James, and Shakespeare

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the poem’s conscious process of interpolation. Mr. Apollinax sits down absurdly to tea at fastidious Professor Channing-Cheetah’s, an intrusive, gurning presence drawn from the depths, still draped about with seaweed. Mr. Apollinax’s laughter is likened to that of ‘an irresponsible foetus’. It is a wild laughter that reverberates with Berowne’s exclamation, ‘To move wild laughter in the throat of death’ (V.ii.), which, Eliot says, ‘leaps out so surprisingly’ at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost. It both penetrates and encompasses the silence of the sea, bearing its weight and depth into the poem’s prim New England drawing rooms and shrubberies. The physical transformation of the human form into something alien exists in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ () in the protagonist’s desire to be ‘a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’ (P ). The Chorus of Canterbury women in Murder in the Cathedral intone, ‘I have lain on the floor of the sea and breathed with the breathing of the sea-anemone, swallowed with ingurgitation of the sponge’ (CPP ). Many figures in Eliot’s poetry undergo metamorphic selfestrangement, like the waiter in ‘Dans le Restaurant’, made to pass again through the stages of his former life ‘Le repassant aux étapes de sa vie antérieure’ (P ). That the transformation is also purgation is clear in the fate of the drowned Phlebas in The Waste Land ’s ‘Death by Water’: A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool.

(P )

The mind’s passage between the stages of age and youth is not aligned to a linear progression, but rises and falls with the current. Sweeney Agonistes () refers to the murder of a girl kept ‘with a gallon of lysol in a bath’ (P ), pointedly combining suspended death with water as cleansing agent (albeit, in this instance, without the relief of the current nor hope of the whirlpool). As he approached the composition of Four Quartets (–), Eliot articulated his exploratory desire to go beyond words, to achieve something of the ‘submarine or subterrene music’ he found in Shakespeare’s later plays. Admittedly, it is in ‘The Dry Salvages’ that the imagery of The Tempest most comes to the fore, especially as that poem draws on earlier draft material for The Waste Land. However, patterns, currents, memory – the restoration of things lost and hidden – all these are heavily figured in ‘Burnt Norton’, ‘East Coker’, and ‘Little Gidding’. ‘East Coker’s



Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

preoccupation with beginnings and ends is, for example, mirrored in the language of Eliot’s critical search for Shakespeare’s patterns: ‘The end is in a sense, implicit in the beginning; and the beginning is explained by the end.’ In their intense concern for the reformulation of language spoken before, the Four Quartets might be said to pass through the stages of age and youth (like Eliot’s Phoenician sailor). ‘Little Gidding’ devotes much space to the interaction of the present poetic consciousness with a composite of the voices of past poetic masters. The intonations of Yeats, Dante, Shakespeare, Virgil, and others flare and fade within the speech patterns of the ‘familiar compound ghost’ who tutors the ‘I’ of the passage in ‘the gifts reserved for age’ and the limits of ‘last year’s words’. ‘Little Gidding’ rehearses anxieties about the necessity and inescapability of artistic influence, which coalesce around the figure of Shakespeare and the transformative metaphor of the sea-change. Of the critical practice of recognising and understanding poetic allusion, Christopher Ricks suggests that having determined that extrinsic material is ‘indeed a source for certain lines’, the reader must decide ‘whether it is also more than a source, being part not only of the making of the poem but of its meaning.’ The Tempest should not be read in relation to Eliot’s poetry as a source, so much as a representation of the imaginative depths the poems attempt to sound. In discussing Shakespeare’s genius for poetic drama, Eliot writes of the elements being woven ‘organically . . . into a much richer design.’ The Four Quartets are full of elision and fusion. Elemental and human distinctions become elided, so that fruitful composites form: earth–sea, where the ocean may be furrowed like a field; ice–fire, where frost is flamed; and coral–bone, where eyes reflect the sheen of nacre. The mineral transformations of Ariel’s song shimmer through even in ‘Burnt Norton’, a poem whose ‘twittering world’ is far removed from the rhythms of the sea: the complementary image appears as ‘garlic and sapphires in the mud’ (P ). In , writing of the death of Jean Verdenal, Eliot imagined his friend being ‘mixed with the mud of Gallipoli’. Mud, like seawater, is a medium of transformative death (although the form of dissolution is more violent and invasively sinister, producing The Waste Land’s sprouting corpse, rather than the vitreous coralline architecture of Ariel’s underwater islands). The globular ‘garlic’ recalls the unquiet corpse in ‘Whispers of Immortality’ (), where ‘Daffodil bulbs instead of balls / Stared from the sockets of the eyes!’ The sapphires are distinctly ocular, like the coins placed on the orbs of the pagan dead to pay the boatman, or the ‘pearls that were his eyes’ of The Tempest. They are also the sapphire eyes of the ‘happy prince’ in the short story by Oscar Wilde (‘The Happy Prince’,

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), plucked out by the swallow in order to sustain impoverished playwrights and match-girls. The clotted forms of ‘Garlic and sapphires in the mud’ can thus be read as the transformed vestiges of a drowned figure, now a fertile, if disintegrative, composite of the vegetative and the crystalline. ‘The Dry Salvages’ returns the process to its prototypical Shakespearean source in the sea. As Eleanor Cook shows, the poem’s title embraces a ‘complex of quotations, allusions, and . . . echoes’ relating to wreckage and salvation. The word ‘Salvages’ suggests a combined derivation from ‘savages’, the dross of wreckage, and that which is saved (from the same Latin root, salvare, ‘to save’). The ambiguity of ‘salvage’ is foreshadowed in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, where ‘The memory throws up high and dry / A crowd of twisted things’ (P ). In his comments on the draft of ‘The Dry Salvages’, John Hayward referred to these complex echoes, understanding the poem’s oceanscape as an internal, contingent environment, perceiving the ‘torn seine’ as the mental salvage of ‘memories of a dead life’: ‘this is a good example of the kind of seachange – the expression seems apt – that a poem suffers and must necessarily suffer in the mind of each reader’. ‘The Dry Salvages’ contains an invocation for the ‘voyagers’ and ‘seamen’, ‘you whose bodies / Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea’. Steeped in the elemental dynamics of creation, subject to the movements of wind and wave, the poem pulls backwards to an imaginary populated by the vestigial ‘strange fishes’ and ‘monstrous Patagones’ of the uncharted Shakespearean sea. This turning back to ‘something rich and strange’ is a painful resurrection of that which was thought dead, and a recognition of that which was thought lost. We have seen how Eliot’s imaginative grammars drew on Dowden’s psycho-biography and Knight’s spatial metaphysics to create for itself a Shakespearean cosmos of near-infinite space. Knight’s symbolist traceries populated this space with the networks and ‘recurrences’ Eliot remarked upon in his introduction to Knight’s book. But it was in Henry James that Eliot found an answering sense of the submarine nature of this habitation. James’s imaginative placement of – and confrontation with – Shakespeare in the space of submarine transformation was crucial in rendering Knight’s mystical abstractions and Dowden’s taxonomies as structures of felt experience. The imaginative primacy of The Tempest in Eliot’s poetry and criticism seems to draw – in its semantic and psychological particularities – on Henry James’s essay on The Tempest, despite the lack of any clear evidence that Eliot read James on Shakespeare.



Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

In early , during his mammoth work of revision for the monumental New York edition of his works, James was asked to write an introduction to The Tempest. As Neil Chilton writes, in his meditation on the play James confronted Shakespeare ‘in the mind: a consummate literary artist whose mysterious genius and bewildering career combine to place upon the reading James a burden no less intolerable, yet altogether more beguiling, than that met with in any “represented Shakespeare.”’ James’s ‘Introduction to The Tempest’ was published in the Sidney Lee Renaissance Edition of the Complete Works in March . But did Eliot read it? Probably. Eliot was a voracious reader, and there is plenty of evidence for his general interest in and sense of affinity with James. (In his survey of Eliot’s writing, Alan Holder is ‘struck by the frequency’ with which James appears in Eliot’s criticism.) After James’s death in , Eliot wrote two obituary essays in the Little Review, describing James as ‘the most intelligent man of his generation’ and quoting from James’s critical study Hawthorne () – Lyndall Gordon describes the extent of retrospective self-reference to these essays in Eliot’s letters as ‘unprecedented’. He published Herbert Read’s review of The Prefaces of Henry James in the Criterion, thereby giving space and credence to James the critic. In his Clark Lectures (), Eliot observes, ‘The influence of Donne runs out in three channels . . . We shall have to reascend these streams’, an allusion (as Ronald Schuchard points out) ‘to Henry James’s technique of reascending the stream of thought behind his tales and novels in the Prefaces to the New York Edition . . . “as I remount the stream of composition”’. Eliot was clearly aware of Sidney Lee’s Shakespeare scholarship: his July  ‘London Letter’ for The Dial refers to Lee as ‘an astute specialist’. Eliot’s notes for his  extension lectures display knowledge of a range of editions of Shakespeare’s works: The ‘Temple’ and the ‘Arden’ editions of separate plays of Shakespeare, and the ‘Globe’ edition in one volume, are good; the finest critical edition of Shakespeare is Furness’s ‘Variorum’ edition . . . For Shakespeare, Sir Sidney Lee’s Life is the standard biography.

It is therefore highly probable that Eliot encountered James’s ‘Introduction’ somewhere in his vast reading. The language in which James describes the ambiguities of The Tempest is soaked in the spectral, the crepuscular, and the submarine: ‘the innumerable dim ghosts that flit, like startled game at eventide, through the deep dusk of our speculation, with just form enough to quicken it’. Critical attempts at interpretation are ‘enveloped in sound and smoke’.

Immersion: Eliot, James, and Shakespeare



Shakespeare’s creative process constitutes immersion via ‘a series of incalculable plunges’. In  Eliot described the process of poetic creation as a plunge into the depths, like ‘a person who has dived very deep and comes up holding firmly some hitherto unseen submarine creature’. Discussing the currents of Shakespeare criticism in , he wondered, ‘Should we not rather just soak ourselves in the poetry and drama of Shakespeare’? Immersion is the initiation of the process of soaking and of saturation, a word that – with its variants – appears four times in the conclusion to Eliot’s  Norton Lectures. Images have a ‘personal saturation value . . . I suggest that what gives it such intensity as it has in each case is its saturation . . . with feelings too obscure for the authors even to know quite what they were’ (UP –). He writes of Kubla Khan that the ‘fragment . . . sank to the depths of Coleridge’s feeling, was saturated, transformed there – “those are pearls that were his eyes” – and brought up into daylight again’ (UP ). Moving from Coleridge to The Tempest, Eliot recurs once more to gestational, metamorphic imagery: ‘again and again the right imagery, saturated while it lay in the depths of Shakespeare’s memory, will rise like Anadyomene from the sea’ (UP –). Eliot’s use of the language of saturation is a sounding of the Jamesian depths. James’s emphasis, in writing about The Tempest, on immersion resonates with and substantiates Eliot’s intuitive response to the play. It also provides a metaleptic onward connection, linking the Shakespearean magic of transformation to another modern iteration of the metaphor: Joseph Conrad’s ‘destructive element’. In the Criterion in , I. A. Richards described The Waste Land by recourse to a line from Conrad’s novel Lord Jim (): ‘In the destructive element immerse’. The footnote also contained Richards’s notorious comment that Eliot’s The Waste Land effects ‘a complete severance between his poetry and all beliefs’. While Eliot took exception to the latter pronouncement, he did not, tellingly, comment on the reference to Conrad (UP ). In the relevant passage of the novel Stein says: A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns . . . The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up . . . In the destructive element immerse.

The passage positions itself in multiple relation to Hamlet, in its exploration of ‘How to be’ (‘That is the question’), in its meditations on



Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

waking and dreaming, and in its preoccupation with drowning and submission. Conrad’s novel is itself most immediately echoed in ‘Prufrock’, whose fragile hero (‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be’) lingers ‘in the chambers of the sea’, but risks drowning upon waking. Both ‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land – as Richards keenly observed – suggest an underlying concept of the compositional process as requiring an immersion in the creative medium that necessarily risks self-extinction. A decade after writing ‘Prufrock’, Eliot wrote of the creative act as an annihilatory ordeal involving ‘a continual surrender . . . to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual selfsacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ In ‘Yeats’ Eliot describes Shakespeare’s arrival at maturity as ‘a perfect form . . . of development’, because it evinces a ‘unique personality’. Given the inconsistency this appears to create with his earlier calls for poetic impersonality, Eliot defends his revised position, suggesting that for the mature artist impersonality can take the form of ‘a general truth’ or symbol, arising ‘out of intense and personal experience’. These comments form an intimate counterpoint to the early self-projection apparent in ‘Hamlet and His Problems’. When Eliot speaks of intense and intimately personal experience being universalised and rendered into symbol, he seems to be describing Shakespeare as having become metaphor: the abstraction of self into symbol (or, in Tennyson’s terms, ‘I am become a name’). Something of this is played out, albeit in cruder, more brutal form, in The Cocktail Party. Hearing of Celia’s journey of transformation (‘to become a thing’), Lavinia realises that together with the other members of the party Peter has been ‘living on . . . an image of Celia / Which you made for yourself, to meet your own needs’ (CPP ). The play incorporates a realisation absent from the critical comments, that the extraction of a ‘general symbol’ from a poet’s ‘personal experience’ is a process in which the reader’s desires are complicit. Eliot’s comments also suggest a possible rationale for some of his critical and creative lacunae regarding The Tempest. Given Eliot’s interest in the metamorphic possibilities of the play – his repeated refashioning of the sea-change in his own works – it is strange that he pays no attention to Prospero’s commanding role in the play’s multiple metamorphoses. Eliot omits the magician from his reiterations of the play’s magic, choosing instead to give Ariel a solo voice. This is oddly in contrast to the centrality accorded Coriolanus in Eliot’s poetic reimaginings of the eponymous play. This may be because Eliot equates Prospero with Shakespeare as the animating artistic consciousness behind

Immersion: Eliot, James, and Shakespeare



and within The Tempest. Coriolanus is a central figure in the play that bears his name, but his actions bear no relation to the activities of the playwright. But for anyone accepting the equivalence between Shakespeare and Prospero, the latter becomes a figure of the playwright within his own play (an identification aided by Prospero’s staging of the play-within-the-play, and likening of this ‘insubstantial pageant’ to ‘the great globe itself ’) (IV.i.–). To cite Prospero as the central will behind his magical art would constitute an unacceptable incursion of un-transmuted artistic personality. Aided by his reading of James, Knight, and Dowden, Eliot’s musing on Shakespeare developed a distinctive topos, with pattern as the defining feature of its imaginative grammar. In ‘The Music of Poetry’ () Eliot juxtaposes the supposed absence of formal patterns within modern poetry with the ‘musical structures . . . a music of imagery as well as sound’ that he finds in both individual scenes and whole plays by Shakespeare. He suggests that contemporary poetry may in fact be searching for patterns, arguing that ‘the tendency to return to set, and even elaborate patterns is permanent’. Notes  ‘A Prediction in Regard to Three English Authors, Writers Who, Though Masters of Thought, Are Likewise Masters of Art’ (), Prose II, p. .  ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse: Two Lectures’, Prose V, p. .  Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, p. .  ‘Introduction’, in Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (London, ), p. xiv.  Ibid., pp. xii, xiii.  Quoted in F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (Oxford, ), p. .  ‘Introductory Essay to London: A Poem and the Vanity of Human Wishes by Samuel Johnson’ (), Prose IV, pp. –.  James, ‘Introduction to The Tempest’, p. .  Writing about Eliot’s belated reading of Twain (whom he did not fully discover until ), Jennifer Formichelli finds ‘an uncanny loveliness’ in Eliot’s rediscovery of a childhood landscape through the memories he shared with Twain. Jennifer Formichelli, ‘Childhood in Twain and Eliot’, Literary Imagination / (), –, .  Tennyson’s Tiresias charts a similarly cardinal course in ‘Following a torrent till its myriad falls / Found silence in the hollows underneath’, although here the momentum of the waters dwindles into silence. Alfred Tennyson, Tiresias and Other Poems (London, ), p. .  ‘Introduction’, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, p. xii.



Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

 Eliot even considered writing an autobiography of his early life and calling it ‘The River and the Sea’, as he wrote in a letter to Herbert Read ( Sep. ), quoted in Formichelli, ‘Childhood in Twain and Eliot’, .  ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Prose I, pp. .  ‘In Memoriam’ (), Selected Essays, p. .  ‘The Music of Poetry’, OPP, p. . See also Eliot’s comments to this effect in ‘The Social Function of Poetry’ (), OPP, p. .  ‘The Music of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  ‘Shakespearean Criticism I: From Dryden to Coleridge’, in Harley GranvilleBarker and George Bagshawe Harrison (eds.), A Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge, ), p. .  ‘The Social Function of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  ‘Gentlemen and Seamen’ (), Prose I, p. .  Ibid., Prose I, p. .  Quoted B. A. Harries, ‘The Rare Contact: A Correspondence between T. S. Eliot and P. E. More’, Theology / (), .  Eliot’s ‘familiar compound ghost’ recalls Shakespeare’s ‘affable familiar ghost’ from Sonnet , ‘Was it the proud full sail of his great verse’. Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, p. . The ripples of these encounters extend beyond Eliot, too. Consider Derek Walcott’s Omeros (), which asks, ‘Why waste lines on Achille, a shade on the sea-floor? / Because strong as selfhealing coral, a quiet culture / is branching from the white ribs of each ancestor’. Derek Walcott, Omeros (London, ), p. .  ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, P, p. .  James, ‘Introduction to The Tempest’, p. .  ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry [IV]’ (), Prose II, p. .  Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London, ), pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures – on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, vol.  (London, ), pp. –.  Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, p. .  Stephen Orgel, ‘Introduction’, in The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford, ), pp. , .  Thomas Campbell, ‘Remarks on the Life and Writings of William Shakespeare’, in The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (London, ), pp. lxiii–lxiv.  Edward Dowden, ‘Shakspere’, in John Richard Green (ed.), Literature Primers (London, ), pp. –.  Edward Dowden, ‘The Scientific Movement and Literature’, Studies in Literature – (London, ), pp. , .  Dowden, ‘Shakspere’, pp. , .  See, for example, Eliot’s letter to Colin Still ( May ), author of Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: A Study of ‘The Tempest’ (), in which he affirms that his is ‘mostly in agreement’ with Still’s reading of the play as an

Immersion: Eliot, James, and Shakespeare

       



          

 



allegorical enactment of a mystery rite reversing the Fall of Man, in which Prospero stands as the pagan hierophant. Letters V, pp. –. Lytton Strachey, ‘Shakespeare’s Final Period’, in Books and Characters, French and English (London, ), pp. –, , . Ibid., pp. , , , . Discussed in Part II. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Prose II, p. . ‘Dante’, Prose III, pp. , . ‘Shakespearean Criticism I. From Dryden to Coleridge’, pp. , . Richard Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns (Ithaca, ), p. . Wilson Knight characterised Shakespeare’s as a ‘visual imagination’ concerned with the ‘horizontal’: ‘transcendence is generally suggested through music or infinity-symbols of vast ocean . . . Both expanse and depth are involved’. The Mutual Flame: On Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Phoenix and the Turtle (London, ), p. . In  Eliot’s ‘understanding of Shakespeare was transformed by his discovery of Wilson Knight’s holistic approach to the oeuvre’, when he read the manuscript of ‘Thaisa’. Harding, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Shakespeare’. ‘Thaisa’ became the opening chapter of The Crown of Life (; London, ), published ‘on Eliot’s strong recommendation’. Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, p. . Knight, The Crown of Life, p. . G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme (; London, ), p. . The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, p. . ‘Introduction’, Wheel of Fire (), Prose IV, pp. –. Ibid., p. . Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, p. . ‘Dante’, Prose III, pp. , . For a penetrating analysis of the ‘art and scope’ of Eliot’s allusions to Shakespeare in Ash-Wednesday, see Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, pp. –. Athenaeum ( Sep. ), –. Reprinted as ‘Hamlet’, Prose II, pp. –. Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare (Oxford, ), p. . See, for example, ‘Shakespeare and Montaigne’, Times Literary Supplement ( Dec. ), ; ‘A Popular Shakespeare’, Times Literary Supplement ( Feb. ), ; ‘Mr. J. M. Robertson and Shakespeare [a Letter to the Editor]’, Nation & Athenaeum ( Dec. ), ; ‘The Problems of the Shakespeare Sonnets’, Nation & Athenaeum ( Feb. ), , ; and ‘Mr. Murry’s Shakespeare’, Criterion / (Jul. ), –. ‘Foreword’, in Henri Fluchère, Shakespeare, trans. Guy Hamilton (London, ); and ‘Introduction’, in Samuel Leslie Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (London, ), pp. –. Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, pp. , . Older surveys appear in Sudhakar Marathe, T. S. Eliot’s Shakespeare Criticism: A Perfect Form of



 

                

   

Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest Development (Delhi, ); and Charles Warren, T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare (Michigan, ). See also Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns. ‘The Social Function of Poetry’, OPP, p. . This attitude is not unusual. As Jonathan Bate notes in his study of Shakespearean influence on the English Romantics, even Goethe complained of Shakespeare’s repressive influence, observing: ‘A dramatic talent of any importance . . . could not forbear to notice Shakespeare’s works . . . he must be aware that Shakespeare has already exhausted the whole of human nature in all its tendencies, in all its heights and depths, and that in fact there remains for him, the aftercomer, nothing more to do.’ Quoted in Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford, ), p. . ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Prose II, pp. –. Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, p. . ‘To Criticize the Critic’, in To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings, p. . ‘Dante’, Prose III, pp. –. ‘Hamlet’, Prose II, pp. , . Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, pp. –. ‘The Poetic Drama: A Review of Cinnamon and Angelica: A Play, by John Middleton Murry’ (), Prose II, p. . Kermode, ‘Eliot and the Shudder’, –. ‘Milton II’ (), OPP, p. . James, ‘Introduction to The Tempest’, pp. , . ‘Shakespeare and Montaigne: An Unsigned Review of Shakspeare’s Debt to Montaigne, by George Coffin Taylor’ (), Prose II, p. . The poem was first published in pamphlet form in Faber’s Ariel Poems series,  Sep. . Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, p. . ‘Yeats’ (), OPP, p. . ‘Preface’, Elizabethan Dramatists (London, ), p. . Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, p. . For detailed discussion of the afterlives of the play, see Chantal Zabus, Tempests after Shakespeare (Basingstoke, ); Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (eds.), ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels (London, ); and Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge, ). Russ McDonald, ‘Reading The Tempest’, Shakespeare Survey  (): –, . Sarah Annes Brown, A Familiar Compound Ghost: Allusion and the Uncanny (Manchester, ), p. . ‘To Criticize the Critic’, in To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings, p. . In the prologue to his Tempest-inspired libretto Some Episodes in the History of Miranda and Caliban (), Russell Hoban writes: ‘The way I see it Shakespeare didn’t invent Caliban; Caliban invented Shakespeare . . . Caliban is one of the hungry ideas, he’s always looking for someone to word him into being’. Russell Hoban, The Moment under the Moment (London, ), p. .

Immersion: Eliot, James, and Shakespeare

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 Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, p. .  See Ronald Tamplin, ‘The Tempest and The Waste Land’, American Literature / (), –; Gayle Greene, ‘Shakespeare’s Tempest and Eliot’s Waste Land: “What the Thunder Said”’, Orbis Litterarum / (), –; and Sarah Annes Brown, ‘A Familiar Compound Ghost: Katabasis and The Tempest’, in A Familiar Compound Ghost: Allusion and the Uncanny (Manchester, ), pp. –.  Reviewing the draft version of The Waste Land in , William Empson suggests that the ‘central theme of The Waste Land . . . is about a father . . . variations upon “Of his bones are coral made” . . . come into all five sections of the poem (ll. , , , , ).’ William Empson, ‘My God Man There’s Bears on It’, Essays in Criticism / (), .  Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, pp. , .  Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, p. .  Inventions of the March Hare: Poems –, ed. Christopher Ricks (London, ), p. .  Jason Harding, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Shakespeare’, Essays in Criticism / (April ), –.  ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  Corcoran notes with characteristic assiduity that in ‘Prufrock’ the ‘subtlety of allusive reinvention . . . far outstrips the more primary irony of the allusion to Hamlet in The Waste Land ’ in its concern with ‘the predicament explored and with the literary history of that predicament.’ Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, p. .  ‘What Dante Means to Me’ (), in To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings, p. .  ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, Prose III, pp. –.  ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, OPP, p. .  Zwicky, ‘Lyric, Narrative, Memory’, pp. , .  ‘The Social Function of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  Zwicky, ‘Lyric, Narrative, Memory’, p. .  Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, p. .  Letters I, p. .  Letters I, p. .  ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse: Two Lectures’, Prose V, p. .  Ibid., p. .  To my knowledge, the sole prior instance of a sustained analysis linking Four Quartets and The Tempest is an unpublished  Harvard undergraduate thesis. Its author, Ellen Peel, perceives the heart of the interrelation of the two works in their approach to change and movement, but attempts to fit each into a set tension between linear movement (permanence) and circular movement (constant change). She overstates the case in finding a ‘remarkable similarity’ in the structure, imagery, and even philosophy of the play and the poems (the precise nature of this philosophy remains unclear), even going so far as to claim that Four Quartets represents ‘a modern statement of

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     

  

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 

Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest The Tempest’s ideas’. See Ellen Peel, ‘Art and Change: A Comparison of The Tempest and Four Quartets’, (unpublished MA thesis, Harvard University, ), pp. , . Sarah Annes Brown’s insightful study A Familiar Compound Ghost () contains a chapter on the ghostly afterlife of The Tempest that begins with a suggestive discussion of the compound ghost of ‘Little Gidding’. Brown’s analysis accords with my own thinking insofar as she finds Eliot ‘conspicuously susceptible to the reflexive potential of “Full Fathom Five”’ and is alert to the ‘transhistorical, refractive and cumulative’ aspects of the encounter’s antic echoes (pp. , ). However, Brown’s work is distinct in that it operates within the context of a wide-ranging survey of uncanny ‘allusion markers’ (deliberately obtrusive instances of allusion). Her reading of Four Quartets is informed and circumscribed by this interest. Brown reads Ariel’s song in The Waste Land as ‘an emblem of Eliot’s collagist poetic procedures’, argues for ‘Little Gidding’ as a reenactment of Homeric katabasis, and views its ghost as ‘an emblem for intertextuality itself ’ (pp. , ). Ricks, Allusion to the Poets, p. . ‘Introduction to The Wheel of Fire’, Prose IV, p. . ‘A Commentary’, Criterion / (Apr. ), . Eleanor Cook, ‘The Senses of Eliot’s Salvages’, Essays in Criticism / (), –. Letter to Eliot,  Jan. . Quoted in Gardner, Composition of Four Quartets, p. . Thomas Lodge’s maritime account, A Margarite of America (London, ), is a possible source for Shakespeare’s ‘what strange fish / Hath made his meal on thee?’ (II.i.–): ‘in those straits christned by Magelan; in which place to the southward many wonderous Isles, many strange fishes, many monstrous Patagones withdrew my senses’. Charles Frey, ‘The Tempest and the New World’, Shakespeare Quarterly / (), –. Neil Chilton, ‘Conceptions of a Beautiful Crisis: Henry James’s Reading of The Tempest’, The Henry James Review / (fall ), . Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays (Chicago, ) traces Eliot’s literary allusions to James. Alan Holder, ‘T. S. Eliot on Henry James’, PMLA / (), . For example, ‘A Prediction in Regard to Three English Authors’, , ; ‘London Letter’, Dial  (Sep. ), ; and The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (), ed. Ronald Schuchard (New York, ), p. . ‘In Memory of Henry James’, Prose I, pp. –, first published in the Egoist / (Jan. ), –; and ‘The Hawthorne Aspect’, Prose I, pp. –, first published in the Little Review / (Aug. ), –. These two essays were collected and reprinted as ‘On Henry James’, F. W. Dupee (ed.), in The Question of Henry James (New York, ), pp. –. Although he judged that ‘James was emphatically not a successful literary critic’. ‘In Memory of Henry James’, Prose I, pp. , . Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (London, ), p. .

Immersion: Eliot, James, and Shakespeare       

      

   

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Herbert Read, ‘Shorter Notices’, Criterion / (Jul. ), –. The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, p. . Ibid. ‘London Letter: June, ’, Prose I, p. . First published in the Dial / (Jul. ), –. Ronald Schuchard, ‘T. S. Eliot as an Extension Lecturer, –’, The Review of English Studies / (), . James, ‘Introduction to The Tempest’, p. . Ibid., p. . ‘Immersion’: one of James’s favoured images. See, for example, Merton Densher’s sense in Venice ‘of immersion in an element rather more strangely than agreeably warm’ (The Wings of the Dove (; New York, ), p. ); or Lambert Strether’s feeling of being ‘enlisted and immersed’ in the moral schemes of New England, only to experience in Paris ‘deep immersion’ in a very different ‘fathomless medium’ (The Ambassadors (; New York, ), pp. , ). Compare the related importance to James of ‘saturation’, especially the artist’s need for ‘saturation with his idea’ (‘The Lesson of Balzac’ (), in Henry James: Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, ed. Leon Edel (New York, ), pp. –). Letters I, p. . ‘Shakespearean Criticism I: From Dryden to Coleridge’, pp. –. Eliot writes that Marianne Moore ‘seems to have saturated her mind in the perfections of prose’. ‘Introduction’, in Marianne Moore, Selected Poems (London, ), p. . I. A. Richards, ‘A Background for Contemporary Poetry’, Criterion / (Jul. ), . Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. Jacques Berthoud (–; Oxford, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Compare the antiphonal discussion of Ophelia’s in Hamlet (IV, vii): Laertes: Alas, then she is drowned. Gertrude: Drowned, drowned. Laertes: Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia . . . And the clowns’ discussion of the willed-ness of drowning: ‘but if the water come to him / and drown him, he drowns not himself’ (V, i). ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Prose I, p. . ‘Yeats’ (), OPP, pp. , . ‘Coriolan’ (), P, pp. – ‘The Music of Poetry’, OPP, p. .

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‘Hints of earlier and other creation’

In , Eliot distinguished what he termed Shakespeare’s ‘pattern’ from Dante’s, which is ‘interwoven chiefly with the systematic pattern which he set himself’. Eliot appears to be using the term ‘pattern’ to signify a moral scheme (Dante’s Thomism). He tests the limits of Shakespearean patternings against the more ordered, catechistic structures of Dantean metaphor, and finds that, compared with the ease with which Dante’s pattern might be discerned, ‘with Shakespeare we seem to be moving in an air of Cimmerian darkness’. We might well ask, then, why Eliot’s poetic instincts did not lead him to ground his own poesis in Dante’s imaginative systems (his thinking is, in many other respects, utterly bound up with Dante). The answer may lie in the very darkness Eliot complains of. Dante’s lucid imagination is a closed system, visible to its farthest reaches. It is a brilliant, poignant, and encompassing vision, but remains firmly scaffolded on the rudiments of medieval cosmology. It can be emulated, more or less crudely, by a modern poet, but – having no gaps or fissures – it cannot be entered. Eliot valued the imperfect, the crack that lets the light get in. In an early piece of philosophical journalism he contrasts the terminal perfection of F. H. Bradley with the prodigal openness of Leibniz: [Bradley] has the melancholy grace, the languid mastery, of the late product. He has expounded one type of philosophy with such consummate ability that it will probably not survive him. In Leibniz there are possibilities. He has the permanence of the pre-Socratics, of all imperfect things.

Just so, the chaotic darkness Eliot sensed in Shakespeare may have been the necessary precondition for his own immersion. Eliot explores this dark territory in ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ (), surveying the fissures in the poetic consciousness of the seventeenth century: The end of the sixteenth century is an epoch when it is particularly difficult to associate poetry with systems of thought . . . as if, at that time, the world 

‘Hints of earlier and other creation’

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was filled with broken fragments of systems, . . . Donne merely picked up, like a magpie, various shining fragments of ideas as they struck his eye, and stuck them about here and there in his verse.

Eliot differentiates Shakespeare from Donne by imagining Shakespeare as a unifying principle: It has been said that Shakespeare lacks unity; it might, I think, be said equally well that it is Shakespeare chiefly that is the unity, that unifies so far as they could be unified all the tendencies of a time that certainly lacked unity.

Here the ‘tendencies of a time’ are still specific movements of thought (Senecan, Machiavellian, Montaignian) rather than compositional processes, but the essay’s conceptual substratum is intimately bound up with the imaginative structures of creative thought. Faced with ‘broken fragments of systems’ the metaphysical magpies adorn their verses with bright splinters. In contrast, Shakespeare’s ‘self-consciousness’ allowed him to create patterns from the ruins: ‘Shakespeare was a much finer instrument for transformations than any of his contemporaries, finer perhaps even than Dante.’ Once again, it is Henry James who influences Eliot in formulating a concept of Shakespearean pattern. In ‘Dante’, Eliot describes the ‘relation between the various plays of Shakespeare, taken in order’ in distinctly Jamesian terms, as ‘the pattern in Shakespeare’s carpet.’ In James’s The Figure in the Carpet (), a critic becomes obsessed with discerning a pattern in the work of a teasingly cryptic novelist: It was something, I guessed, in the primal plan, something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet. He highly approved of this image when I used it, and he used another himself. ‘It’s the very string,’ he said, ‘that my pearls are strung on!’

James’s fast-moving figures of speech flash from the innate (‘primal plan’) to the contrived (the artistry required for the woven carpet and the strung pearls). They reveal the fine tension of a concept poised between deliberate and natural patternings, between patterns figured on a surface and those that emanate from somewhere beneath or within. Eliot’s assimilation of James’s language is evident in his observation that Middleton, by comparison with Shakespeare, had ‘the less coherent pattern in his carpet’. In Eliot’s introduction to The Wheel of Fire, James’s ‘figure in the carpet’ becomes Eliot’s ‘pattern in the carpet’. In this act of alteration Eliot acknowledges his borrowing: ‘the pattern of the carpet . . . is something to be found in . . . Henry James who gave the phrase its currency.’

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Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

James is careful to limit his image, even as much of the wit and warmth of his novella stems from the enormous significance allotted to it by the protagonists. The conscious scheme employed by the cryptic novelist cannot be read as a universal theory of unity within the work of less forthcoming writers (the novella disdains those ‘maniacs who embrace some bedlamitical theory of the cryptic character of Shakespeare’). Eliot was similarly dismissive of those who find in Shakespeare ‘some patent system of philosophy of his own, esoteric guide to conduct, yogabreathing or key to the scriptures’. His instincts shied away from systematic revelation. Sensitive to the self’s opacity to itself, he accepted the limitlessness of ‘the depths into which we cannot peer’ (UP ). Yet Eliot was not entirely content to withdraw his critical curiosity from The Tempest nor to resile from siting a systemic pattern within the Shakespearean corpus. Despite his resistance to the dangers of interpretation (a  Harvard seminar paper critiques sociology and anthropology on such grounds), in  Eliot described a personal process of surrender to the ‘restless demon’ of Shakespearean interpretation that necessarily oversteps the boundaries set on criticism, and bears quoting at length: our impulse to interpret a work of art . . . is exactly as imperative and fundamental as our impulse to interpret the universe by metaphysics . . . the surrendering ourselves . . . to some system of our own or of someone else, is as needful part of a man’s life as falling in love or making any contract, so is it necessary to surrender ourselves to some interpretation of the poetry we like.

Despite his reservations about attempts to discern meaning in poetry, he suggests that the scholarly work of source-hunting ‘must be done to prepare for the search for the real pattern’, and admits that ‘to seek to pounce upon the secret, to elucidate the pattern and pluck out the mystery, of a poet’s work, is “no less an instinct”’. The extent to which Shakespeare’s language is imbedded in Eliot’s critical consciousness is suggested by the echo of Hamlet’s rebuke of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: . . . you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass . . . (III.ii.–)

Of what, then, does the pattern consist? Eliot had too great an awareness of the inherent revisionism of science to settle comfortably into a specific theoretical language. To employ the terminology of ‘paradigm shifts’

‘Hints of earlier and other creation’

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popularised by Thomas Kuhn, Eliot’s studies at Harvard had made him sensitive to the contingency of the ruling theories of science and to their tendency to fall away when replaced by new assumptions. This may be why James’s lightness of phrase appealed, and why Eliot’s most oftrepeated analogies (patterns, figures, music) are elusively noncommittal. In its delicate abstraction, the Jamesian ‘figure in the carpet’ can be understood as a form of super-analogy, similar to the logarithmic spirals identified by mathematicians, which appear to give an underlying pattern to distinct events in nature – the growth of a nautilus shell, the fruitlets of a pineapple, the flowering of artichoke, an uncurling fern, the arrangement of a pine cone, the spirals of galaxies, and weather systems. Their recurrence creates meaningful resonances in the observing mind, but is not proof of a deliberate design. Certainly, all these dispersed analogies appealed to Eliot, but it is instructive that he did not attempt to synthesise them nor to graft them onto a conceptual framework, although he did refer to poetry ‘startling us into an unusual awareness of visual patterns, with something like the fascination of a high-powered microscope.’ An overt concern with patterns runs through Four Quartets, as if reiteration of the word ‘pattern’ might itself form a mutating sequence. Despite appearing at least eleven times in Selected Essays, the word ‘pattern’ occurs only twice in all of Eliot’s earlier published poetry, until ‘Burnt Norton’, which it pervades. As with much in ‘Burnt Norton’, however, the emphasis on pattern is darkly and stridently prefigured in Eliot’s versedrama Murder in the Cathedral: What is woven on the loom of fate What is woven in the councils of princes Is woven also in our veins, our brains, Is woven like a pattern of living worms . . . (CPP )

Christopher Ricks writes that ‘Pattern, which itself plays so patterning a part throughout Four Quartets, had been glimpsed but not understood; it waited “To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern”’. He suggests the ‘glimpse in the prose can help us, as it helped Eliot, towards “a recognition of the truth that not our feelings, but the pattern which we may make of our feelings, is the centre of value”’. In the s and s, Eliot increasingly referred to Shakespeare’s pattern as an unearthly music of artistic development and transcendence, building across the whole scope of Shakespeare’s plays. Eliot’s project to develop musical rhythm and allusiveness in his own poetry grew out of his

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Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

meditations on the Shakespearean music of poetic creation. The ‘pattern in the carpet’ of Shakespeare’s plays is something beyond both ‘verbal beauty’ and the philosophical ‘system’ of which it might loosely be considered the ‘emotional equivalent’: And of this sort of ‘pattern’ the most elaborate, the most extensive, and probably the most inscrutable is that of the plays of Shakespeare . . . our first duty as either critics or ‘interpreters’ . . . must be to try to grasp the whole design, and read character and plot in the understanding of this subterrene or submarine music.

Eliot’s ‘submarine music’ recalls Henry James’s ‘faint wandering notes of a hidden music’. Eliot spoke at length about Shakespeare’s submarine music in two unpublished lectures on ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse’ delivered at Edinburgh University in , and at Bristol University in  (they appeared in German translation in ), restating his view that ‘the appreciation of these plays is not a matter of conscious enjoyment of each passage as it comes, but of a cumulative effect like a great piece of music.’ Eliot’s description of ‘hints of . . . the hidden music, the under and overtones’ in Shakespeare’s early plays is paralleled in ‘Burnt Norton’ (‘unheard music hidden in the shrubbery’), and ‘The Dry Salvages’ (‘hints and guesses’). In ‘Burnt Norton’, the imagined figures in the rose garden at first move ‘in a formal pattern’, but later, when ‘the boarhound and the boar / Pursue their pattern as before’ (PI ), the word is divested of formality and imbued with a primal momentum. To Charles Warren, Eliot’s use of ‘musical’ signifies merely ‘the sensuous, total, and more-than-rational involvement of the audience in the “meaning” that is being posited.’ From this premise, Warren arrives at a definition of Eliot’s Shakespearean music as ‘our involvement as in liturgy . . . he is trying to put us on the way to thinking about something’. Yet Eliot’s musical patterns resist such a definition, at once circumscribed and vague. The phrase ‘the pattern of the carpet’ recalls the intuitive sense-response of the newborn soul in ‘Animula’ () – written a year earlier – which takes ‘Pleasure in the wind, the sunlight and the sea; / Studies the sunlit pattern on the floor’ (PI ). Unlike patterns in carpet, the patterns made by sunlight are shifting and transient. The lines marry transitory light-patterning with the ingrained patterns of the floor, which may have its own whorls and markings fixed in carpet or wood-grain. The sunlight-derived pattern appeared in Eliot’s criticism, too. Discoursing on Early Modern drama in ‘John Marston’ (), Eliot wrote:

‘Hints of earlier and other creation’

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As we familiarise ourselves with the play we perceive a pattern into which the characters deliberately involve themselves, the kind of pattern which we perceive in our own lives only at rare moments of inattention and detachment, drowsing in sunlight.

(In his magisterial T. S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature (), Steven Matthews suggests that this essay was heavily influenced by Eliot’s encounter with G. Wilson Knight’s interpretations of Shakespeare.) The shifting and fugitive aspects of pattern as rendered in Eliot’s poetry distinguishes ‘pattern’ from ‘liturgy’. Rather than a ritualised form, Eliot imagines the Shakespearean pattern as a dynamic, attenuated undersong and shaping rhythm. In formulating his theory, Eliot struggles to coin a new critical language, finding in Shakespeare two patterns which can be distinguished but not divided: the dramatic and the musical. One must be careful not to take this term ‘musical’ too literally . . . I mean that it is something over and above plot, development of character, and conflict of character: a pattern of motion in which the characters do more than act of themselves, and of speech expressing more than what the characters know or know they feel. Something is exhibited of which we have only rare glimpses in our daily life . . . in the rhythms and the imagery, in their recurrences and permutations, there is a pattern of emotion beyond that which we originally know as human.

As Shakespeare reaches artistic maturity, Eliot discerns in his plays faint musics from ‘another plane of emotion’ that gives the plays’ characters ‘a double existence’. The mastery inherent in the late plays is distinguished by ‘a pattern of feeling of which the plot and characterisation exhibit, so to speak, only the under side.’ Eliot writes that the ‘music of poetry’ inheres in two related patterns: ‘a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of the words which compose it’, defined as ‘an allusiveness which is in the nature of words’. Expanding upon his theory of the allusive musical pattern in , Eliot broadens his analogy of submarine music into an extraordinary oceanic synaesthesia: The term ‘musical pattern’ . . . may now be seen to be inadequate; because in a play of Shakespeare this is a pattern in which all the senses are used to convey something beyond sense – not only the sense of ear and eye, because, in reading Pericles, I have a sense of a pervading smell of seaweed throughout.

This description recalls Ariel’s effect on the conspirators in The Tempest, in whom he induces a similar synaesthesia:

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Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest . . . I beat my tabour; At which, like unback’d colts, they prick’d their ears, Advanced their eyelids, lifted up their noses As they smelt music . . . (IV.i.–)

In  Wilson Knight wrote of The Tempest developing less through sharp conflicts than through a succession of interchanging and discontinuous moods . . . In this, they have much in common with the variations, the undulating swell and subsidence of mood of thought . . . this varying, undulatory, movement appears to characterise works where poetry . . . aims at a full integration of essences . . . such are . . . T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Eliot’s many sea voices, submerged yet profound, instantiate the poet’s dialectical engagement with tradition. Their simultaneity – imported from the panorama of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ – grants to Eliot’s versification a multiplicity and transhistoricity unconstrained by the fixity of the land-bound tableau. The voices do not overwhelm (although the threat is ever-present) because they are sounded at a remove, distorted by the elliptical motion of currents under waves. Sometimes the voices are elemental: the groans of the sea itself or the pivotal voice in the rigging of ‘The Dry Salvages’. In ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ () the voices are dehumanised into ‘Defunctive music under sea’ that ‘Passed seaward with the passing bell’ (PI ), moving ever farther beyond reach of the crumbling denizens of Venice in ruin. The presence of the bell recalls the clangourous sounds of Shakespeare’s sea nymphs at the conclusion of Ariel’s song, ringing out a funereal toll for the drowned seafarer (‘Burthen Ding-dong’). Eliot’s Prufrock is excluded from such sea music, but feels its absence (‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me’) (PI ). Although the songs of ‘seagirls’ riding the waves in ‘Prufrock’ hold out the destructive suggestion of siren song, it is, significantly, the jarring intervention of ‘human voices’ that precipitates the collusive drowning of protagonist and reader. The rhythmic patterns of marine motion formed a complex within modernist creativity, where waves functioned as an emblem of the relations between depth and surface. They provided a ready analogy for Jungian accounts of an expansive but submerged collective unconscious (an encompassing ocean), with the movements of the water’s surface an apt motif for the interactive tensions between inner and outer worlds. Gillian Beer describes an ‘oceanic communality . . . voiced alike by Woolf in The

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Waves and by Schrodinger’, who ‘wrote of “conscious awareness as something emerging in individuals like tips of waves from a deep and common ocean”’. As Daniel Albright suggests, the ‘wave’ model of creation emphasises the unity of the poet’s corpus, its echo and recurrence: The generative energy of a wave has no natural terminus . . . The poem similarly may continue to exclaim, subside, exclaim again, until the poet runs out of paper . . . the poet of the waves writes, in a sense, only one poem, his whole canon . . . 

T. E. Hulme wrote in  of the surface of the mind as ‘a sea in a continual state of motion’ with ‘so many waves on it’: ‘their existence was so transient, and they interfered so much with each other, that one was unable to perceive them. The artist by making a fixed model of one of these transient waves enables you to isolate it out and to perceive it’. For Hulme, the motion of waves is irregular and self-interfering. Only by fixing a paradoxical instant of frozen motion can the artist discern their own internal patterns of movement. ‘Little Gidding’ finds a moment of peace in ‘the stillness / Between two waves of the sea’, a momentary stillness defined against perpetual, encompassing movement. Eliot’s culminating wave image at the close of the Quartets superficially suggests regular, metrical motion, an impression undercut by its affinity with Shakespeare’s ‘wave o’ the sea’, from The Winter’s Tale: when you do dance, I wish you A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that; move still, still so, And own no other function. (IV.iv.–)

This is a moment of joyful buoyancy, exempt from the before-and-after of marine motion. Eliot’s emphasis on stillness in the momentary valley between waves glimpses an instant of pure form without movement beneath (or between) the currents of motion. In ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’ (), Eliot aspired to the ‘constant evasion and recognition of regularity’: ‘It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.’ ‘East Coker’ similarly rejects the ordered fixity of knowledge derived from ordinary experience as it ‘imposes a pattern, and falsifies’. Instead, ‘the pattern is new in every moment’, transforming the contours of the mental landscape. As time passes, the world ‘becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated’ (PI , ).

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Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

‘The Dry Salvages’ muses that ‘It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence’. In ‘Little Gidding’ ‘they vanish, / The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, / To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.’ In ‘Burnt Norton’, ‘the detail of the pattern is movement’, but it is movement (like the fiery stillness of a star in space) that yearns towards suspended animation (PI , , ). Kermode argues that Shakespeare’s last plays achieve ‘a control of language and imagery formerly unequalled’: ‘Metaphor gleams momentarily . . . the basic rhythm . . . becomes more ghostly, a burthen heard faintly through the flux of thought’. Describing this involution away from formal tropes and imagery to reflect the depths from which language is drawn, Kermode himself draws on liquid metaphors. Formal figures are ‘swamped’, metre is ‘fluid’, language ‘moves with the movement of thought’. Considering the dramatic silences at the heart of Coriolanus and The Winter’s Tale, he argues that Shakespeare’s ‘later language, and so his theatre, does not lose all contact with the eloquence of his early work, but moves deliberately in the direction of a kind of reticence that might . . . be thought close to silence.’ In his study of the cultural context of Eliot’s writings, Steve Ellis argues that Eliot’s gradual acceptance of his debt to Shakespeare was grounded in a process of ‘classicisation’, which Eliot undertook during the s: ‘As we approach the period of the Quartets’ completion . . . Eliot begins to strive much harder to bring Shakespeare himself into the classicist camp’. Ellis places Eliot’s classicisation of Shakespeare in the context of the countertendencies in some Modernist criticism to view Shakespeare as the exemplary hero-anarchist of the Romantic tradition. This was a position championed by John Middleton Murry, for whom – emphatically – ‘Shakespeare has no pattern’. Eliot singles out Shakespeare because, uniquely, he ‘carried out, in one short lifetime, the task of two poets.’ Out of the decline, ‘dissolution and chaos’ of the seventeenth century, an ideal set of relations arise, realised first in Shakespeare’s pared back verse of ‘naturalness and beauty’, then later in a movement ‘from simplicity towards elaboration’. Eliot’s descriptive interweaving of Shakespearean intricacy and simplicity recalls Henry James’s portrait of Shakespeare as a composer, writing the ‘music’ of The Tempest: his fingers ‘stray far, for his motive, but at last he finds and holds it, then he lets himself go, embroidering and refining’. But if (contra Ellis), Shakespeare’s final stage was not classicist simplicity, but elaboration, what does this mean for our understanding of Eliot’s poetic relationship with

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Shakespeare’s pattern? The answer lies in a re-examination of Eliot’s description of Shakespeare’s development as ‘some profound law of nature’, an arc in which there is a point at which he touches the imagination and feeling of the greatest number of people to the greatest possible depth, and that thereafter, like a comet continuing its course away from the earth, he should gradually disappear into his private mystery.

In the space between the zenith of his communicative powers, and his disappearance from view, The late Shakespeare is occupied with the other task of the poet – that of experimenting to see how elaborate, how complicated, the music could be made without losing touch with colloquial speech altogether, and without his characters ceasing to be human beings. This is the poet of Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, and The Tempest.

Colloquial speech is fused into a music that is ‘elaborate’ and ‘complicated’, but not ornamental. The simplicity of emotion is retained, rendered in an elemental, musical language emanating ‘from the depths of Shakespeare himself ’. ‘The Dry Salvages’ provides a useful example of how Eliot’s music of allusion draws on Shakespearean patterns of elaboration and simplification. The ‘voice descanting’ passage – of twenty years’ imaginative fermentation – revives The Tempest’s aethereal voices: At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial, Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear, The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language) (P )

Part Four of The Waste Land originally began with a related account of an illfated sea voyage off the coast of New England (Facs –, ), drawing on Dante’s Ulysses Canto (Inferno XXVI), Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (), and Tennyson’s Ulysses, and marking the first reference to the Dry Salvages in Eliot’s poetry (Facs ). Both the  draft and the  poem allude to The Tempest, but the differences are illuminating. The earlier incarnation of the passage has not one figure but three: . . . I thought I saw in the fore cross-trees Three women leaning forward, with white hair Streaming behind, who sang above the wind A song that charmed my senses.

(Facs )

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Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

In this more conventional mythological version, the music is straightforwardly a siren-song for the doomed sailors. It charms the senses, rather than surpassing them. In the later passage the three women are transformed into a disembodied voice (which may be one or many) whose keening rises not just ‘above the wind’ but above the ear itself, ‘the murmuring shell of time’. Unformed and unnamed, the voice both is and is not Shakespeare’s Ariel. His presence is concealed in the metaleptic echo of the line break, where ‘the aerial, / is a voice descanting’. (Metalepsis is a form of allusive echo that occurs via an intermediary – a weaving of allusive patterns within the hearer’s mind.) The homonym ‘aerial’ functions to recall the sylph-like spirit who divided and burnt on the top mast of Alonso’s ship, especially given the proximity of ‘murmuring’, with its echo of Prospero’s threat to Ariel (‘If thou more murmur’st . . .’) (I.ii.). Part Three of ‘The Dry Salvages’ takes shape gradually. The train station gives way to the ‘deck of the drumming liner’, before the rigging of the whaler appears. In contrast, the passage in The Waste Land draft begins with a sharp juxtaposition: The sailor, attentive to the chart or to the sheets, A concentrated will against the tempest and the tide, Retains, even ashore, in public bars or streets Something inhuman, clean and dignified.

Thrown into relief against the familiar landscape of Eliot’s early poetry (‘illicit backstreet stairs’, ‘girls and gin’), the mariner retains an otherness. The elemental ordeal of tempest and tide, his commerce ‘with wind and sea and snow’, has marked him out. Eliot’s pairing of maculate and immaculate is a recurrent feature of his sensibility, an attempt to achieve the ‘fusion of sordidness and magnificence’ that he felt to be ‘a part of the pattern’ of Shakespeare’s plays: Kingfisher weather, with a light fair breeze, Full canvas, and the eight sails drawing well. We beat around the cape and laid our course From the Dry Salvages to the eastern banks. A porpoise snored upon the phosphorescent swell, A triton rang the final warning bell Astern, and the sea rolled, asleep . . .

(Facs )

The ship’s progress from the Dry Salvages to the ‘phosphorescent swell’ of the open sea delineates a shift of narrative register from the maritime to the

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overtly mythological. The sea voyage is a journey into the underworld, marked by the appearance of Charon the ferryman, ‘a dead man in an iron coffin, / With a crowbar row from here to Hell’ (Facs , ). The  version incorporates the florid classical imagery of porpoises and tritons less successfully than ‘A Game of Chess’ (where tender cupidons manage to appear with carved dolphins without engulfing the action of the scene). By the time of ‘The Dry Salvages’, the warning bell rung by the merman has been simplified, replaced by the ‘sea bell’ tolling through the ‘silent fog’. The speaker in the draft cries ‘Remember me’ (Facs ), a compound allusion suggesting both Arnaut Daniel’s plea to Dante in Canto XXVI of the Purgatorio (‘sovegna vos’) and, more faintly, Purcell’s Dido (‘When I am laid in earth’ from Purcell’s Dido and Æneas ()) and the ‘widow Dido’ sequence in The Tempest (II.i.–). ‘Remember me’ is also the final phrase spoken by the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Hamlet (I.v). The phrase suggests a relationship between Eliot’s poetic fragment and his  comments on the protean perfection and ‘astonishing variation of style’ of the dramatic dialogue at Hamlet’s opening. The interchange between the night-guards and between Horatio and Marcellus is a ‘stupendous piece of writing’, demonstrating Shakespeare’s ‘mastery in dramatic verse’ – ‘beyond which . . . it is impossible to go.’ This is because ‘Shakespeare has developed the colloquial beyond the monologue of the character part . . . The diction has become perfectly transparent’. Eliot’s poetic account of the sailors’ voyage attempts a similar series of variations. The opening mimics dramatic monologue, with its scene-setting phrases (‘we beat around the cape and laid our course’) woven into the sound scheme of the passage so that their colloquialism is blended with the drama of the unfolding story (‘A spar split for nothing, bought / And paid for as good Norwegian pine’). The line ‘Three knots, four knots, at dawn; at eight o’clock’ recalls the ‘staccato’ of Horatio’s words to the Ghost, as well as the night-sentries’ foreboding. The crew’s homely complaints of weeviled biscuits and brackish water are cut short by an abrupt shift into Tennysonian lyric (‘. . . the sea with many voices / Moaned all about us’). In contrast to this early material, with its overdetermined symbolism and uneasy baroque gestures, Eliot’s later poetry yearns towards stillness. By the late s, Eliot wanted ‘to get beyond poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strove to get beyond music’. His poetic project had intersected with his critical interest in charting Shakespeare’s development. In The Tempest, James writes, Shakespeare ‘sinks as deep as we like, but what he sinks into, beyond all else, is the lucid stillness of his style.’

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Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

Eliot picks up the Jamesian phrase in ‘Burnt Norton’ as ‘daylight / Investing form with lucid stillness’ (P ). This is no coincidence. Elsewhere, Eliot refers to James’s style as justifiably divorced from ‘lucid simplicity’. Shakespeare’s pattern manifests in Eliot’s late poetry as the perfect realisation of an antiphonal movement between simplicity and elaboration, not as a fixed dialectic, but a fluid navigation between them. ‘Burnt Norton’ revolves around ‘the dance’ at the ‘still point’ entailing ‘neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity’. There is a constant movement between elaboration and refinement, between exploration and consolidation. Eliot’s relationship with silence underwent a parallel development, the lucid stillness of his later poetry balancing the silent seas of his earlier work. The poetry moves from the silence of the void to a silence of potential, increasingly complicated and overlaid by the partial awareness of whispers. The philosopher of perception Roy Sorensen describes silence as ‘the sound shadow’ and posits a synaesthesia for the perception of multiple absences, arguing that ‘blanks can sometimes be organized into a gestalt pattern’. Eliot’s ‘Silence’ () portrays a consciousness terrified by the sudden stillness of ‘seas of experience’ tyrannous in their scale and depth. It envisages an urban landscape of beleaguered islands, isolated by vacillating tidelines of an urban streetscape. The encroaching ‘incidents’ thrown up by ‘the garrulous waves of life’ counterpoint ‘the ultimate hour’, signalled by a nihilistic suspension of the waves (‘At such peace I am terrified’) (P ). Yet behind the poem’s Pascalian silences lie subliminal, salt-cured voices. Ricks lists Kipling’s Bertran and Bimi () as a source for Eliot’s Sweeney poems. Bertran and Bimi features a German sailor who ‘owned a voice as soothing as the wash of the sea, and stores of experiences as vast as the sea itself’. There seems to be a connection between Kipling’s sailor with his ‘stores of experiences as vast as the sea itself’ and Eliot’s terrified vision of ‘seas of experience / That were so broad and deep’. Kipling’s depiction of the German as a vatic voice in the dark (‘I watched the glowing end of his cigar wax and wane in the gloom, as the sentences rose and fell’) echoes Conrad’s Marlow (‘It was so pitch dark . . . he, sitting apart, . . . no more to us than a voice . . . in the heavy night-air’). It is unclear whether it was these connections or others that caused Eliot to jot down, ‘for comparison, Bertran and Bimi and Conrad, in his notes for the lecture-course he taught at Harvard in .’ ‘Silence’ establishes the rudimentary form of a recurring pattern of poetic imagining that plays upon the vastness of the ocean and its metaphysical dualities: cleansing and dissolving, encompassing and isolating,

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amniotic buoyancy and dragging cold, movement and suspension, voyage and entrapment. As the poetry develops and deepens in complexity it becomes more alive to the shifting soundscapes between the poles of human experience (immediate and transcendent). In ‘Prufrock’, the seas are complicit in the silence (‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’). Sorensen describes silence as ‘parasitic on the location of sound. Just as a shadow borrows the shape and volume of a material object that might have filled its space, silence borrows the direction and location of a possible filler sound.’ Eliot’s early adult poems depict silence as a vacuum out of which life cannot develop. The silent sea surrounding the isolated claws in ‘Prufrock’ projects the nonbeing of the myriad teeming creatures that should drift in its waters – it is the silence of marine lives not lived. These shadow presences are ‘metaphysical amphibians with one foot on terra firma of common sense and the other in the murky waters of nonbeing’. In The Waste Land, the ‘heart of light, the silence’ is followed by the emptiness of another apparently barren sea: ‘Öd und leer das Meer.’ (Eliot’s silent seas may owe something to Coleridge’s ‘The Eolian Harp’, where ‘The stilly murmur of the distant Sea / Tells us of silence’.) These negative silences are gradually (although not completely) replaced by the consummating silence of a celestial white noise. Silence and white noise are acoustically similar: the former has no sound, the latter is created by mixing sounds. ‘Just as white light combines all of the frequencies of visible light, white noise combines all the frequencies of sound.’ The comparison is an important one, as the middle-aged Eliot tended to yoke silence and white light together as a cipher for moments of inexpressible revelation. In , Eliot referred approvingly to lines from Marianne Moore’s poem ‘Silence’ (): ‘The deepest feeling shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint.’ In Ash-Wednesday, the central figure is the ‘lady of silences’, while the ‘silent Word’ embraces the full potential of the Incarnation. This pregnant silence cannot ‘resound’ in the world, as ‘there is not enough silence . . . on the sea or on the islands’ (P , ). Here, silence is the necessary vessel for sound (‘the gift of silence’, as in ‘Choruses from The Rock’), rather than its dark shadow. In the submerged sonority of the Shakespearean oceanscape, Eliot was able to explore silence as alternately negative and encompassing. Shakespeare’s ‘lucid stillness’ gave an allusive form to Eliot’s imagining of silence – one that he directly incorporated into his later poetry, from Ash-Wednesday on.

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Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

‘Burnt Norton’ achieves a poetry of silences more prosaic than Shakespeare’s allusive patterns. The patterns evoked by the transience of words or music falling away into silence are those of reverberation, like a tuning fork that hums at a frequency too high for human ears: . . . Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness.

(P )

The Shakespearean refusal to settle into certainty is exemplified in both the language and rhythm of Florizel’s ‘move still, still so,’ an amalgam of opposing forces that rebounds upon itself, disrupting the regularity of the iambic undercurrent. Eliot’s ‘still / Moves perpetually in its stillness’ is one of many echoes across Eliot’s oeuvre: Ash-Wednesday has ‘the unstilled world still whirled’ (P ); ‘Virginia’ equivocates ‘No will is still as a river / Still’ (P ); and Murder in the Cathedral gives ‘the wheel may turn and still / Be forever still’ (CPP ). Eliot returns to the same hybrid at the conclusion of ‘East Coker’, where Florizel’s ‘move still’ becomes the unearthly motion of the sea’s exhalations: We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. (P )

In the many instances of Eliot’s rhythmic and conceptual play on the variegated senses of ‘still’, meaning is made to chase its own tail, often across the line break, fusing the colloquialism of sudden doubt (‘still’ as ‘yet, still, I’m not sure’) with the sublimated sanctity of an unheard bell (where ‘still’ is made to toll in silence). This is a realisation of the music of poetry as the entwined ‘musical pattern of sound and . . . musical pattern of the secondary meanings of the words which compose it . . . an allusiveness which is in the nature of words’. Notes  ‘Introduction to The Wheel of Fire’, Prose IV, p. .  ‘Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centres’ (), Prose I, p. .

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 ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ (), Prose III, p. . My emphasis.  Ibid.  ‘Dante’ (), Prose III, p. .  Henry James, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, ed. Frank Kermode (London, ), p. .  ‘A Game at Chesse. By Thomas Middleton’, Times Literary Supplement ( Jan. ), .  James, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, p. .  ‘Introduction to The Wheel of Fire’, Prose IV, p. .  James, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, p. .  ‘Introduction to The Wheel of Fire’, Prose IV, p. .  The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual (), Prose I, pp. –.  ‘Introduction to The Wheel of Fire’, Prose IV, p. .  Ibid.  See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, ).  Gary Taylor has written of this effect in relation to the study of literature. See Reinventing Shakespeare, chapters  and .  In his seminal The Fractal Geometry of Nature (), Benoît Mandelbrot argues that seemingly random patterns found at any scale in nature are in fact a single, infinitely repeated shape.  ‘Introduction’, in Marianne Moore, Selected Poems, p. .  In ‘Animula’ (discussed below) and The Waste Land, Part Two, where unguent fumes stir ‘the pattern on the coffered ceiling’ (P ).  In ‘Animula’ (discussed below) and The Waste Land, Part Two, where unguent fumes stir ‘the pattern on the coffered ceiling’ (P ). Eliot from ‘A Brief Introduction in the Method of Paul Valéry’, Prose II, p. .  ‘Introduction to The Wheel of Fire’, Prose IV, pp. , .  James, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, p. .  ‘Shakespeare’s Verskunst’, Der Monat  (), –.  ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse: Two Lectures’, Prose V, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Warren, T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare, p. .  Ibid., p. .  ‘John Marston’ (), Selected Essays, p. . My emphasis.  Steven Matthews, T. S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature (Oxford, ), p. .  ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse: Two Lectures’, Prose V, p. .  Ibid., pp. –.  ‘The Music of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse: Two Lectures’, Prose V, p. .  Knight, The Mutual Flame, p. .  Beer, Open Fields, p. .  Albright, Quantum Poetics, p. .

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Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

 T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (; London, ), pp. –. Eliot describes Speculations as ‘remarkable’ and quotes approvingly from it in ‘Mr. P. E. More’s Essays. An unsigned review of The Demon of the Absolute, by Paul Elmer More’ (), Prose III, p. .  ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’ (), Prose I, p. .  ‘Introduction’, in The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (London, ), pp. lxxviii, lxxix.  Ibid., pp. lxxix–lxxx.  Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, p. .  Steve Ellis, The English Eliot: Design, Language and Landscape in Four Quartets (London, ), p. .  Ibid., pp. –.  John Middleton Murry, Shakespeare (London, ), p. . For Eliot’s review of Murry’s book, see ‘Mr. Murry’s Shakespeare’, Criterion / (Jul. ), –.  ‘The Music of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, Prose III, p. .  ‘The Music of Poetry’, OPP, pp. , .  James, ‘Introduction to The Tempest’, pp. –.  ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse: Two Lectures’, Prose V, p. .  ‘The Music of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse: Two Lectures’, Prose V, p. .  Compare another instance: ‘And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly’ (‘Burnt Norton’), which summons what we might call ‘the spectre of a Rose’ (P , ).  See John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley, ), p. .  ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse: Two Lectures’, Prose V, p. .  Although ’s ‘kingfisher weather’ is echoed more directly in the later ‘halcyon day’.  ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse: Two Lectures’, Prose V, pp. –.  F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (Oxford, ), p. .  Ibid., p. .  ‘Milton I’ (), OPP, p. .  ‘Silence’ here refers to a poetic and auditory theme, rather than the enacted silences of the mise en page.  Roy Sorensen, ‘Hearing Silence: The Perception and Introspection of Absences’, in Matthew Nudds and Casey O’Callaghan (eds.), Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays (Oxford, ), pp. , .  Inventions of the March Hare, p. .  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, ed. Cedric Watts (Oxford, ), p. .  Inventions of the March Hare, p. .

‘Hints of earlier and other creation’        



Sorensen, ‘Hearing Silence’, p. . Sorensen, Seeing Dark Things (New York, ), abstract. ‘Desolate and empty the sea’, from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, III.i. . Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’ (), in Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London, ), p. . Sorensen, ‘Hearing Silence’, p. . ‘Introduction’, in Marianne Moore, Selected Poems, p. . Compare Pound’s Canto : ‘but the mind as Ixion, unstill, ever turning’. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (; New York, ), p. . ‘The Music of Poetry’, OPP, p. .

 

‘This isle is full of noises . . .’

Beside the loud-murmuring sea . . .

– Homer, Iliad, :

As with so much in Eliot’s criticism, a phrase such as the ‘musical pattern of sound’ must be understood in relation to a complex tissue of recurring and evolving thought. In ‘Milton I’ (), Eliot describes a feeling for the musical pattern of sound as an expression of the ‘auditory imagination’. He criticises Milton’s failure to fuse the auditory and visual imaginations, and therefore to ‘infuse new life into the world, as Shakespeare does.’ (Despite this, the line Eliot quotes from Milton – ‘vacant interlunar cave’ – provides the rhythmic rudiments for the ‘vacant interstellar spaces’ of ‘East Coker’.) In contrast, Eliot finds that in Shakespeare’s verse ‘the auditory imagination and the imagination of the other senses are more nearly fused, and fused together with the thought’. Yet this description draws weight and precision from an earlier, more detailed  definition in which the auditory imagination encompasses the fused character of Shakespeare’s verse: What I call the ‘auditory imagination’ is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. (UP –)

This dynamic of retrieval and fusion is repeatedly expressed in the metaphorical conjunction of sea and sound. Eliot shared with Pound an appreciation of the cognate imaginative richness of the loud-murmuring sea. Pound expressed his sense of imperative and his frustration in a letter of , writing: The deep is so deep, like clear fathoms down. Para thina poluphloisboio thalasses: the turn of the wave and the scutter of receding pebbles. 

‘This isle is full of noises . . .’



Years’ work to get that. Best I have been able to do is cross-cut in Mauberley, led up to: . . . imaginary Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge . . . 

Eliot’s ‘Choruses from The Rock’ similarly looks to the sea (here coupled with stone) to provide the sensory armature upon which to mould artistic creation: The soul of Man must quicken to creation. Out of the formless stone, when the artist unites himself with stone, Spring always new forms of life, from the soul of man that is joined to the soul of stone; Out of the meaningless practical shapes of all that is living or lifeless Joined with the artist’s eye, new life, new form, new colour.

(P )

There is a beautiful, Empsonian ambiguity to the first of these lines, alternately suggesting that the peregrine soul must hasten to the moment of its realisation in flesh, or that the dormant soul within Man must be awakened to creative activity by a flint-spark from the formless abstraction of the unhewn stone. The stone is made to bear a heavy metaphorical load pressured almost to breaking by ‘the soul of stone’; its unmoving density yields to the dynamic metaphors of saturation and music: Out of the sea of sound the life of music, Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions, . . . There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.

Eliot returns to the figure when he writes that the poet ‘must, like the sculptor, be faithful to the material in which he works; it is out of sounds that he has heard that he must make his melody and harmony.’ Eliot’s repeated image owes something to the tormented moment in The Winter’s Tale where Leontes’s hope and doubt before the statue of his dead wife is perfectly poised between the incontrovertibility of King Lear (‘She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass; / If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, / Why, then she lives’) (V.iii.–) and the sudden miracle of Pericles (‘But are you flesh and blood? Have you a working pulse? and are no fairy?’) (V.i.–): ‘Still methinks / There is an air comes from her. What fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath?’ Of course, Shakespeare’s isle of noises is the locus classicus of the struggle to translate a musical pattern of felt experience into language:

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Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest . . . the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices . . . (The Tempest, III.ii.–)

Here, in Kermode’s fine phrase, ‘the speech of the sea [is] caught up in the singing of the wind’. Ariel is the archetypal literary realisation of the elemental poetic voice. His magic is effected largely through unseen oracular means. Like music, he can permeate the heights and depths of his world, into ‘the ooze / Of the salt deep,’ on ‘the sharp wind of the north,’ ‘in the veins o’ th’ earth’ (I.ii.–), and ‘full fathom five’ into the sea’s dark troughs. The Tempest treats sound as a kind of magical energy, disembodied and able to suffuse the air in rippling patterns like light through water. In order that Ariel might fill the air around Ferdinand with airs and sighs, Prospero instructs the sprite to ‘make thyself like a nymph o’ th’ sea: be subject / To no sight but thine and mine, invisible / To every eyeball else’ (I.ii.–). Ferdinand’s first response upon hearing Ariel’s nymph song is to wonder at the location of the music (‘Where should this music be? I’ th’ air or th’ earth?’), half-understanding it as an emanation from the unstable preternatural fabric of his environment. Ferdinand’s description of the music evinces a doubleness: it is possessed of will and external to himself (‘it waits upon / Some god o’ the island’), yet permeates his consciousness, allaying the fury of the sea as well as the turmoil of his grief. He is unsure whether the agency is his own (‘I have follow’d it’) or the music’s (‘Or it hath drawn me rather’). This passage was of sufficient importance to Eliot for him to use it twice in The Waste Land. Its combination of sea and song with an invisible source provides the model for Eliot’s own, similarly disembodied sea voices. Whether moving through air or water, sound takes the form of waves, a framing that suggests its natural affinity with other movements of – and under – water. Eliot’s ear was alive to this auditory affinity: in Sweeney Agonistes, the site of transformations (both sinister and redemptive) is a stylised island, characterised by tropical flowers, palms and banyans, and the ever-present ‘sound of the coral sea’ (P ). In ‘Choruses from The Rock’ the figure appears on its flood tide, the sound of the sea becoming the sea of sound from which the ‘life of music’ springs. The recurrent pairing of ‘sound’ and ‘sea’ forms an auditory undertow mimicking the boom-and-fade sound pattern of surf on a beach. Eliot had earlier played with similar sound patterns in his discussion of the auditory imagination in the Clark Lectures (), combining ‘sound’ and ‘sense’ in heaped

‘This isle is full of noises . . .’



reiteration and variation (‘from sound to sense; from the sound of the word to the sound of the sense of the word, if you like the sense of the sound or the sound of the sense’). Although he was not to formulate (or at least articulate) his sense of the importance of submarine music to the process of poetic creation until the s, some of Eliot’s poems of the s and early s reach towards marine-derived sound patterns. The final two stanzas of ‘Prufrock’ memorably play with the plangent echoes of the waves: I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The crest-and-trough vowel patterns (‘seen . . . seaward’, ‘sea-girls . . . wreathed . . . seaweed’) sound the ‘menace and caress of wave that breaks on water’, while the almost overloaded breathiness of the compounding / w/ phonemes (‘seaward’, ‘waves’, ‘white’, ‘waves’, ‘wind’, ‘water’) push the reader to articulate the wind that ‘blows the water white and black’. Eliot repeatedly effects the rounded movement of air and water, returning to ‘flow’ in his Landscapes, although there – in ‘Virginia’ – the river’s movement is sluggish: ‘Slow flow heat is silence’. In The Family Reunion, the painful awakening of Spring is described as ‘the slow flow throbbing the trunk’ (CPP ). Consider, too, the tidal pattern of the lines in ‘Marina’, ‘unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own’ (P ). In ‘Prufrock’, the rhymes (‘brown’, ‘drown’; ‘back’, ‘black’) act as crosscurrents drawing the ear back and forward across the lines in a suggestive, rippling series of auditory transmutations. Eliot uses hyphenated and compounded words in a manner similar to that discussed by Kermode in relation to The Tempest: The most remarkable changes are rung on the word “sea” and its compounds. The sea, the voyages it supports, and the wrecks it causes, are types of the action of grace and providence. Hence the ‘sea-change’, and ‘seasorrow’. Hence the description of the sea as never surfeited, as incensed, as invulnerable, as apparently cruel, as revealing guilt, as a force which swallows but casts again, which threatens but is merciful.

In ‘Prufrock’, the compound word ‘seaward’ is echoed four lines later in another – ‘seaweed’ – and these two together suggest a third: sea-word. The rolling transition between vowel sounds rebounds like sea-spray in the



Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

mind. The ‘seaweed’ appears as the means by which the speaker is held captive by the sea girls, a botanical siren-song – one can, after all, be wreathed about with song. In The Waste Land, a further compound appears in the form of ‘sea-wood’: ‘Huge sea-wood fed with copper / Burned green’, and again, in Ash-Wednesday, ‘white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying’ (P , ). In Eliot’s  draft of The Waste Land, the presence of a multiplicity of sea voices is more explicit: ‘So the crew moaned; the sea with many voices / Moaned all about us’ (Facs ). As the ship sails farther away from land, the moaning of the sea becomes the rolling howl of a tempest: Northward, leaping beneath invisible stars And when the lookout could no longer hear Above the roar of waves upon the sea The sharper note of breakers on a reef, We knew we had passed the farthest northern islands, So no one spoke again . . .

(Facs )

In this early version, the description is naturalistic: although the roaring of the waves makes the affective suggestion of an angry sea, it is also an apt descriptor for the noise of a storm. The ‘sharper note of breakers on a reef’ suggests the nautical lore Eliot picked up as a young man sailing around Gloucester, Massachusetts – a sailor’s careful delineation of sounds rather than a Shakespearean idiom that rings the changes on the language of the sea. Eliot’s two poems of , Ash-Wednesday and ‘Marina’, are themselves caught up in a riptide of auditory and allusive echoes. ‘Marina’ sets contrary movements against one another. The poem’s epigraph, from Seneca’s Hercules Furens, registers Hercules’s grief and horror upon waking from sleep to discover that under curse of madness he has murdered his family, while the poem’s title and leitmotifs refer to Pericles’s rapturous discovery of his daughter, thought lost. Eliot described the scenes as a ‘crisscross between Pericles finding alive, and Hercules finding dead – the two extremes of the recognition scene’, although this self-conscious juxtaposition quickly becomes subordinated to subtler call-and-response patterns. Pericles’s wondering questions in ‘Marina’ recall the interplay in which the voices of father and daughter are ‘perfectly harmonized’ in Pericles (V.i). The dramatic dialogue is replaced, in Eliot’s poem, by the dialogic motion of the sea itself, which gently bears up the imagery of Pericles’s language: like driftwood, such images return (P –). Corcoran points out that the poem’s syntax and cadence ‘is the

‘This isle is full of noises . . .’



unpunctuated rhythmic motion, the coming and going, of the sea itself, water lapping the bow’, and finds it to be Eliot’s ‘most unconstrained’ poem, ‘naming and miming the process of its own generation.’ Describing the poem’s tidal sound systems, Crawford notes that in the poem’s second verse-paragraph, ‘each line flows out, only to be called to the same place.’ The uneven line lengths and mid-line caesuras create a further pattern of stillness between swells: ‘I made this, I have forgotten / And remember’; ‘Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.’ The ‘awakened’ of the poem (‘lips parted, the hope, the new ships’) are breathed into acoustic life by the sea’s pulse (‘Under sleep, where all the waters meet’) (P –). The final section of Ash-Wednesday contains an extended multi-sensory meditation on the sea, centring on the ‘lost sea voices’. The passage is framed by references to ‘the dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying’ and ‘the time of tension between dying and birth’ (P ), exemplified by the suspended metamorphosis imagined by Ariel and undergone by Phlebas, one of the many presences that shadow the poem. In its submerged dialogue with ‘Marina’, Part Four of Ash-Wednesday looks to the redemptive, ‘dreamcrossed’ landscape of the other poem, Ash-Wednesday’s ‘granite shore’, where ‘The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying / Unbroken wings’ echoes the ‘granite islands’ of ‘Marina’ (P , ). The ‘lost heart’ rejoices in the ‘lost lilac’ and ‘the lost sea voices’. The sensory immersion in the primal ‘lost sea smell’ and the ‘salt savour of the sandy earth’ recall Eliot’s ‘pervading’ sense of the smell of seaweed during his reading of Pericles. Yet the phantasmal Pericles of Ash-Wednesday is late revealed to be, rather, a Lear figure, creating ‘empty forms’ with a ‘blind eye’ that would see dead lips draw breath (‘Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!’ (V.iii.–). Ash-Wednesday – not Hercules Furens – provides the true counterbalance to ‘Marina’, in its ecstasy of paternal recognition. Ash-Wednesday persistently plays on the disorienting revolutions and displacements of dreams and visions. Its invocation of the ‘spirit of the river, spirit of the sea’ and final prayer (‘Suffer me not to be separated’) (P ) are faintly allusive of the dream speech of George, Duke of Clarence (Richard III), which partially prefigures Ariel’s song in its imagery of scattered dissolution on the sea-bed: Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks; Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon; Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl, Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,



Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest All scatter’d in the bottom of the sea: Some lay in dead men’s skulls; and, in those holes Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept, As ’twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems, Which woo’d the slimy bottom of the deep, And mock’d the dead bones that lay scatter’d by.

This earlier incarnation of the Shakespearean sea-change gives emphasis to the element of creeping decomposition, unsoftened by The Tempest’s poetic rendering of bones made coral and eyes made pearl. In this, it has its counterpart in Eliot’s ‘Dirge’ fragment, which is utterly bereft of the magical poignancy of Phlebas’s transformation in The Waste Land. But even within the looser iterations of the theme in Eliot’s post-conversion poetry (where, as Corcoran notes, it is infused with a Christian apprehension of grace), Eliot’s sea-change is never without its darkness, never free of loss. Just as Eliot’s critical discussions of the process of poetic creation retain their haunted sense of bewilderment and affliction, his drowned sailors and submerged kings, once transformed, never wholly escape the horror of their unwilled transformation. In ‘Choruses from The Rock’ those who are bathed in the light of a different but related conversion find yet that . . . their light was ever shot with darkness As the air of temperate seas is pierced by the still dead breath of the Arctic Current . . .

(P )

The sea is always double-faced, perpetual in its revelation and concealment (‘And darkness was upon the face of the deep’). The shuttered blackness of the deep ocean reflects the sense, articulated by Alonso in The Tempest, that the ocean floor is a place of encroaching silence, its mud shutting out thought and sound: ‘my son i’ th’ ooze is bedded; and / I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded, / And with him there lie mudded’ (III.iii.–). In ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land, Eliot filters lines from Sappho’s Fragment  through the prism of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Requiem’, so that ‘the sailor home from sea’ may be a return, not to land, but a final reclamation from the sea only to lie mudded in the earth. Even in ‘Marina’ – the poem that comes closest to attaining a state of grace – there is doubt, and a sense of further reaches and other shores, through the fog, and shimmering through the artesian waters of the subconscious. In ‘Little Gidding’, the sea’s voices are, if not malign, then certainly ominous. The poem imagines the plunge into ‘the sea jaws’

‘This isle is full of noises . . .’



and ‘down the sea’s throat’ (P , ). The abstract, ‘illimitable’ worldscream of ’s draft section of The Waste Land is replaced in ‘The Dry Salvages’ by the ‘dark throat’ behind the ‘sea’s lips’ that receives doomed sailors, a place of silence where ‘the sound of the sea bell’s / Perpetual angelus’ ‘cannot reach’ (P ). It reaches back to Antonio’s account of near-death in The Tempest: ‘We all were sea-swallowed, though some cast again’ (II.i.). ‘The Dry Salvages’ contains passages that achieve an Eliotic submarine music by building layers of aural resonance between the sea and language itself. The couplet that begins the sea voices section of ‘The Dry Salvages’ inaugurates the poem’s oscillation between the differentiated voices of the sea. The line that follows – ‘The salt is on the briar rose, / The fog is in the fir trees’ – combines the bog-sodden heaviness of salt and fog with the more typically poetic rose and conifers, but its measured monosyllables provide a moment of acoustic balance (the calm before the storm) after the irregular descent into the toothsome language of lobster pots and chicken coops of the previous stanza, the auditory ‘ragged rock in the restless waters’ (P , ) of the poem’s sea music. The sea voices themselves recall Shakespeare’s ‘Spirits, in shape of dogs and hounds’, (The Tempest IV. i.) howling, yelping, and whining from between their storm-frothed teeth: The sea howl And the sea yelp, are different voices Often together heard: the whine in the rigging, The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water, The distant rote in the granite teeth, And the wailing warning from the approaching headland

The sea’s protean voices momentarily appear in the ‘sea’s lips’ and ‘the sound of the sea bell’, exquisitely evoked in the layered sound-patterns of the passage. The assonances (precise: ‘groaner . . . homewards’, and reversed: ‘menace and caress’, ‘distant . . . granite’) draw the consonants through the rolling, returning vowel sounds, evoking the pull and flurry of wave-whipped sand. The repetition of compound sea words (‘sea-howl’, ‘sea yelp’, ‘sea voices’, ‘seagull’) gives the passage a saltwater sibilance. The poetry repeatedly tethers objects and actions to the sea in this way, investing them with its currents of movement: the ‘drift of the sea’ expands its motion outwards to ‘the drifting wreckage’ (P ). Eliot’s phrase ‘distant rote in the granite teeth’ spits furious foam from behind its accretion of sharp dentals. Under the menace of the repeated canine metonymies the denotative function of the verbs begins to break down.



Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

Eliot’s undulate syntax in ‘The Dry Salvages’ is shaped by a very Shakespearean juxtaposition of the rough and the fine: the poetic softness of the ‘torn seine’ billows across the line break, catching on the splintered lexical edges of the ‘shattered lobsterpot’. Eliot recreates what Marina Warner describes as the Shakespearean oscillation between ‘rough magic’ and ‘sweet lullaby’. In charting the effects on Shakespeare’s language of ‘the narrative heartbeat of pagan and Renaissance magic’, which ‘nourish[es] the very bone marrow of the plays’, Warner argues that Shakespeare’s language metamorphoses between an ethereal ‘verbal music’ – associated with the ‘sweet lullaby’ sung by Titania’s attendants in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and a ‘rough magic’, ‘an earthy, aural natural language that lies outside these cultured purlieus’, and which operates (on both character and audience) as an ‘event with consequences’. She recalls the exchange in Henry IV between Owen Glendower and Harry Hotspur, the former invoking spirits in high language ‘from the vasty deep’, the latter abjuring ‘mincing poetry’ in favour of language transfused by the grotesque roar and screech of iron and steel (‘I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn’d / Or a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree’) (III.i.–). In The Tempest, Ariel’s song ‘Come unto these yellow sands’ characteristically combines a lyrical light fantastic (‘Foot it featly here and there’) (I.ii.) with the animalistic ‘near-doggerel’ of ‘Bow-wow’, ‘Cock a diddle dow’ (I.ii., ), ‘a nod to the canine metamorphoses of spirits in the play’. Sound waves move through time and physical space, much like the human body. But sound is also originary, linked to and carrying forth the essence of its source event. In this sense, sound replicates the divided nature of the human self, moving through space and time, yet emanating from its source, a point of fixity. As an individual, to speak one’s language is to project one’s voice only across the limited, localised mortal space. Hence the problem, in ‘Little Gidding’, of finding words to speak that neither ‘belong to last year’s language’ nor ‘await another voice’ (P ). In ‘Burnt Norton’, ‘Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden’, assailed by a chaos of ‘Shrieking voices’ (P –). Yet in the later Quartets, it is the very multiplicity of voices that provides the possibility of a poetic language beyond the grave. In contrast to the limits of individual speech, collective sounds may achieve an elemental longevity that outlasts their sources. For example, the collective murmur of a hive of bees extends beyond the life-span of the individual insect, as Sorensen writes:

‘This isle is full of noises . . .’



imagining the species has an infinite past, the murmur could be infinitely old while each bee is only finitely old. The murmur of the innumerable bees illuminates the metaphysics of sound. If sounds are dependent on a particular source . . . then no sound is older than its source. Yet the murmur is older than any bee.

Of Pound’s meditation on the instinctive behaviour of a newborn wasp in Canto LXXXIII of the Pisan Cantos, Hugh Kenner speaks of wasps as ‘intricate patterned energies making intricate patterns.’ (Coleridge was similarly inspired by his vision of the ‘shining swarm’ that ‘breathe on thee with life-enkindling breath’.) Peter Ackroyd writes of the way in which a composite of voices may be more distinct than a singular but imitative one: ‘an indirect voice . . . can create a wealth of tones and meanings by not being definitive in an orthodox sense. It has a strength of tone and allusion because . . . it is located within the contours and recesses of an inherited language.’ Eliot’s charting of the process of poetic creation in ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ opens outwards from a dense, silent centre into branching auditory channels, each one picking up further voices as it continues on: it is in the beginning the pressure of some rude unknown psychic material that directs the poet to tell that particular story . . . then, lines of poetry may come into being, not from the original impulse, but from a secondary stimulation of the unconscious mind. All that matters is, that in the end the voices should be heard in harmony . . . I doubt whether in any real poem only one voice is audible.

‘Little Gidding’ is Eliot’s culminating enactment of the casting again of lost voices, although – following Dante – the articulate dead are drawn not from the ocean’s depths, but from frigid purgatorial fires. Yet the poem’s ghosts retain a sense of being islanded, moving through mist, as do the revenant voices of ‘Marina’. In ‘Marina’, the beloved features shimmer through the fog (‘What is this face, less clear and clearer’), while the poem’s other ghosts are dispersed upon the coastal wind with its ‘breath of pine’ (P ). The ghost of ‘Little Gidding’ has ‘a face still forming’, is ‘compliant’ to the dawn wind. The ghost relates how ‘I left my body on a distant shore’ (P –), a phrase that, in addition to suggesting the suffering peregrinations of Pericles (who believed his wife, Thaisa, and daughter, Marina, to be wrecked on distant shores), recalls the fates of the Crusader pilgrims of ‘Choruses from The Rock’, who ‘left their bodies to the kites of Syria / Or sea-strewn along the routes’ (P ). The compound adjective ‘sea-strewn’ looks back to the violent action of the unwitnessed



Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

storm with a reductive clarity that renders drowned men as tangled strands of seaweed. ‘Little Gidding’ picks up the metamorphoses at a further point: the compound ghost, no longer troubled by bodily transformation, is a ‘peregrine’ spirit, a disembodied voice speaking from outside time. In ‘Little Gidding’, ‘the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living’ (P ) precisely because in being infinitely old this speech takes on the character of an elemental music. In an aside to ‘The Music of Poetry’, Eliot refers to ‘the murmur of innumerable bees’ and ‘the moan of doves in immemorial elms’ as quintessential subjects for poetry. Despite the anti-Georgian satire inhering in this observation, it distils an important point about the collectivity of literary memory. On achieving liberation from serfdom at The Tempest’s conclusion, Ariel sings a final song of self-articulation, which celebrates his commonality with the murmuring bee (‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I’), before receding into the hum of the spheres. From the mid-s, Eliot manifested an interest in Shakespearean song as an ideal realisation of sound pattern, as in his  Clark Lectures: The Elizabethan styles were closer to song – even in their dramatic verse – than the styles of the seventeenth century. It is a variation of focus: the focus is shifted, even if ever so little, from sound to sense; from the sound of the word to the sound of the sense of the word, if you like the sense of the sound or the sound of the sense, to the consciousness of the meaning of the word and a pleasure in that sound having that meaning.

This is a sound pattern that derives its richness from the relation between auditory and secondary allusion. Eliot’s Landscapes, composed during –, seem to prefigure the Quartets as exercises in mature Shakespearean style. In his  introduction to Marianne Moore’s poems Eliot refers to ‘a control which makes possible the fusion of the ironicconversational and the high-rhetorical’, and mentions ‘Shakespeare’s songs’ as an instance of poetry in which a balance of form and matter produce a ‘pattern movement’ with ‘a solemnity of its own’. Consider Eliot’s ‘Virginia’ (P ), with its stilted yet quick-fire rhymes, whose sonority gathers force in the deliberative silences between syllables. There is an element of doggerel in the piling repetition of ‘Red’ and ‘river’ that buffets against the softness and solemnity of the following line (‘Slow flow heat is silence’). It is as if a dialogue is being enacted, between child-like sing-song and pensive evocation, between the babbling of a Fool and the exaggerated gravitas of a Lear. But the poem avoids such pastiche. From here, punctuation begins to dissolve, and rivulets of rhyme flow

‘This isle is full of noises . . .’



over the line endings (‘No will is still as a river / Still’; ‘mocking-bird / Heard’). The persistence of rhyme (‘Never moving. Ever moving’) takes on the chattering tenor of bird-song, subtly attenuated by the poem’s wordplay around stillness, which anticipates the Quartets’ preoccupation with achieving poetic stillness. In his  Shakespeare Lectures, Eliot remarks upon Enobarbus’s dialogue with Anthony in Anthony and Cleopatra (I.ii) (‘Fulvia is dead. / – Sir? / Fulvia is dead. / – Fulvia? / Dead.’), calling it ‘a model of . . . compactness, with behind it the beat of the hidden music’. Although it avoids the interrogative syntax of Shakespeare’s dialogue, ‘New Hampshire’, the first of the Landscapes, approximates Shakespearean music in its brevity, allusive richness, and rhythmic compactness. There is a puckishness to the skipping rhymed tetrameter of ‘Black wing, brown wing, hover over; / Twenty years and the spring is over’, which recalls both Robin Goodfellow and Lear’s Fool. There is a mingling of what Eliot calls ‘gaiety and solemnity’. The matter of the poem – its hidden voices, bird life, green ‘light-in-leaves’, and presage of future desolation – looks forward to ‘Burnt Norton’ and back to Shakespeare’s ‘Under the greenwood tree’: Under the greenwood tree Who loves to lie with me, And turn his merry note Unto the sweet bird’s throat, Come hither, come hither, come hither! (As You Like It, II.v.–)

The greenwood bird’s repeated exclamation (‘Come hither, come hither, come hither!’) is reversed in ‘Burnt Norton’, where the bird calls in response to the unheard, hidden music (‘Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,’ ‘Go, go, go, said the bird’) (P –). The Quartets retain strong elements of this Shakespearean acoustic patterning, but their extended form requires that the song-like rhyming couplets (‘Ash on an old man’s sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave’) be interwoven with other, more prosaic rhythms. Eliot found in A Midsummer Night’s Dream an ‘extraordinary beauty of . . . pattern which is made by interweaving three planes of reality’. Each of the Quartets is similarly textured by the different planes, or registers, that predominate at different moments. In ‘East Coker’ there are the obvious shifts from the hypnotic, almost liturgical opening, into the contemporary, naturalistic movement through the village, into the magical suspension of a summer’s midnight, with its rites by bonfire light, and its



Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

archaic talk of ‘concorde’ (P ). But beyond these key changes, its soundscapes are minutely punctuated by the clarion calls of words that recur in their own allusive and acoustic patterns, subtly separated from the larger flow of the poem: The houses are all gone under the sea. The dancers are all gone under the hill.

The two lines float, unbounded, at the conclusion of Part Two. The monosyllabic emphasis on ‘sea’ and ‘hill’ draw the ear back to earlier conjunctions (as in Stevenson’s ‘sailor home from sea’ and ‘hunter home from the hill’), creating a dynamic of undulation across the shoreline of the line endings. The relation between these sections of ‘East Coker’ and the Shakespearean music of juxtaposition is more than mere scholarly fancy. In his  Shakespeare Lectures, Eliot analyses the music of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet (II.ii), declaring that ‘one is aware from the beginning that here is a musical pattern coming, in this dialogue, as surprising in its kind as the early work of Beethoven’: in the musical pattern it is Juliet’s voice that leads; to her voice are assigned the dominant phrases of the whole duet – My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee The more I have, for both are infinite. and to Juliet is given that key-word ‘lightning’, which occurs again in the play, and which is of the greatest importance in this, one of the swiftest moving of all plays. ’Tis like lightning, which doth cease to be Ere one can say ‘it lightens’.

Eliot’s critical method here is pleasingly reflexive of my own purposes insofar as he is reaching towards an elemental imaginative structure for the play. In his analysis, Eliot associates lightning with swift movement, so it should come as no surprise that this ‘keyword’ appears in both ‘East Coker’ and ‘The Dry Salvages’, where it is part of the pattern of play around movement and stillness out of which creation flows: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. The wild thyme unseen, and the wild strawberry . . . (P )

‘This isle is full of noises . . .’



This passage from ‘East Coker’ is imbued with a participial dynamism (‘dancing’, ‘running’), which – with the addition of ‘lightning’ at the end of the line – overflows the sense of the word, and enters the realm of what Eliot called ‘the sound of the sense of the word’. Lightning is caught in a flash of acoustic doubleness, both noun and verb in the swift-flowing music of the pattern. ‘The Dry Salvages’ revisits the earlier poem’s formulation. Reversing lightning and thyme, thyme and lightning, the poem moves in its own measure (like a dancer): The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses . . . (P )

In the elision of poet and poem within the ‘music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all’, the poem ‘hints’ at the submerged sources of poetic inspiration and recalls Eliot’s statement, four years earlier, that Shakespeare ‘is the unity’. Over the course of the preceding three chapters, I have tried to show that Eliot’s most deeply embedded and powerfully recursive metaphoric language – as well as various key self-analytical terms in his critical idiom – are drawn from and operate within an imaginative structure that amounts to a Shakespearean gestalt. The resonance (in Zwicky’s expansive sense) between Shakespearean seascapes and the memories accrued through a childhood of river and sea was compounded by the voices of other swimmers in the Shakespearean ocean. As Shakespeare became an increasingly exemplary figure in Eliot’s thinking about inheritance, tradition, reproduction, and the bounds and boundlessness of the imagination, the answering pattern became clearer in its poetic and critical articulations. This makes it peculiarly appropriate that it was in Shakespeare – that myriad-minded, protean figure – that Eliot found the primal locus of both imaginative transformation and recognition. Notes  ‘Milton I’, OPP, pp. , .  ‘Beside the loud-murmuring sea’, from Homer’s Iliad, :.  Ezra Pound to W. H. D. Rouse,  May . The Letters of Ezra Pound: –, ed. D. D. Paige (London, ), p. .  ‘The Music of Poetry’, OPP, p. .



Sea Voices: Eliot’s Tempest

 Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, p. .  He leads Ferdinand across the island (I.ii.–), awakens Gonzalo and prevents the King’s murder (II.i.–), and torments Caliban with convulsions, cramps, pinches, and stings (IV.i.–).  The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, p. .  ‘The Dry Salvages’, P, p. .  Kermode, ‘Introduction’, in The Tempest, p. lxxx.  As Valerie Eliot comments in her notes to the draft, this line borrows from Tennyson’s Ulysses: ‘The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep / Moans round with many voices’ (Facs ).  Postscript to a letter to Sir Michael Sadler ( May ), Letters V, p. . Eliot made much the same point in a letter to G. Wilson Knight ( Oct. ): ‘I wanted a crisscross between Hercules waking up to find that he had slain his children, and Pericles waking up to find his child alive.’ Letters V, p. .  ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse: Two Lectures’, Prose V, p. .  Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, pp. , .  Crawford, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Daughter’.  Corcoran describes how, in borrowing from and altering Shakespeare’s sonnet , the opening of Ash-Wednesday raises questions of literary adaptation, subsequence, and displacement ‘intensively’. Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, pp. –.  ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse: Two Lectures’, Prose V, p. .  Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, p. .  Stevenson’s poem ends in the grave: ‘Home is the sailor, home from sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.’  Marina Warner, Signs and Wonders (London, ), pp. –.  Ibid., pp. , , , , .  Ibid., p. . Of course, the ‘rough magic’ itself requires much art, as Warner notes (on p. ), ‘involutions of art upon art, spell upon spell’.  For an outline of the ‘Event View’ of sounds, see Casey O’Callaghan, ‘Sounds and Events’, in Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays, pp. –.  Sorensen, ‘Hearing Silence’, p. .  Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London, ), p. .  Coleridge, ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’, in Complete Poems, pp. –.  Peter Ackroyd, Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism (New York, ), p. .  ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ (), OPP, p. .  ‘The Music of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, pp. –.  ‘Introduction’, in Marianne Moore, Selected Poems, pp. , .  ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse: Two Lectures’, Prose V, pp. –.

‘This isle is full of noises . . .’     



‘Introduction’, in Marianne Moore, Selected Poems, pp. –. ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse: Two Lectures’, Prose V, p. . Ibid., p. . The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, pp. –. Compare Ricks on David Ferry’s use of participial interplay: ‘Ferry often teases us into thought by relating the participial -ing to endings that are no such thing’. Ricks, Allusion to the Poets, p. .  ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, Prose III, p. .

 

Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. – Shakespeare, The Tempest, IV.i.–

 

‘Vacant interstellar spaces’

If Time and Space, as Sages say, Are things which cannot be, The sun which does not feel decay No greater is than we. Substance crumbles, in the thin air Moon cold or moon hot.

In the early twentieth century, the scientific conceptualisation of the dynamics of the universe was exemplified by Einstein’s theories of relativity. In addition to their impact on the way time and space are perceived, Einstein’s theories (and the theories of James Clerk Maxwell and Henri Poincaré, which preceded them) altered the ways in which light is understood. The  St Louis World’s Fair, attended by the young T. S. Eliot and his father, embodied the focal energies of the new physics: heat and light. The physicist Henri Poincaré used the World’s Fair as a platform to call for a modern principle of relativity, and the site (still the largest in World’s Fair history) was lit up by thousands of incandescent bulbs. William Everdell describes the Fair’s ‘technological masterpiece’ as ‘a great complex of electrically illuminated fountains, artificial waterfalls, and watercourses called “The Cascade Gardens.”’ This spectacle of living light – light in motion – could hardly have failed to make some impact on the seventeen-year-old Eliot, and inspired Henry Adams, who attended the opening, to describe it as: a phantasm . . . long lines of white palaces, exquisitely lighted by thousands on thousands of electric candles, soft, rich, shadowy, palpable in their sensuous depths . . . with its vast, white, monumental solitude, bathed in the pure light of setting suns.

(This description appears in Adams’s autobiography, which Eliot reviewed in The Athenaeum in May .) Adams’s description is striking both in its evocation of a cosmic ocean of pure light and in its acute sense of the 



Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

eschatological fragility of this vision. The following year (), Einstein answered Poincaré’s call and developed the quantum of light, suggesting that light waves must travel in distinct packets (das Lichtquant), or photons. When he published his special theory of relativity that September, light itself became the governing constant between mass and energy (‘the speed of light’). This chapter considers a formulation of the process of artistic creation that draws on the blinding lucency, limitless astronomical spaces, and subatomic gaps of twentieth-century science. Creation is conceived of as a movement outwards from an imagined solar centre into the entropy of what Eliot in ‘East Coker’ called ‘vacant interstellar spaces’ (P ). The vacuity of space also exists in the interstices beneath the solid surfaces of matter, as ‘the void within the atom’ and as the space behind the eye. The spherical revolutions of subatomic particles around a nucleus and the endless spiralling of galaxies are both present in the ‘still and still moving’ dance at the ‘heart of light’ in ‘Burnt Norton’. As a graduate student, Eliot was kept abreast of developments in physics and astronomy. As Michael Whitworth outlines, Eliot would have encountered the physicist Leonard Troland, who lectured on Einstein’s theory of special relativity at Harvard in November  and gave an exposition of Planck’s quantum theory the following year. Eliot’s contemporaneous poem ‘The Burnt Dancer’ (dated June ) constellates flame, darkness, stars, and distance in an occluded cosmic dance shadowed by hints of chaos and destruction: ‘The destiny that may be leaning / Toward us from your hidden star / Is grave, but not with human meaning’ (P ). Even beyond academic circles, the newest developments were acknowledged as public events. In a  review Eliot refers casually to ‘space, time, causality’ and imagines experience dissected into fiery particles. Writing his July  ‘London Letter’ for the New York Dial, Eliot observes, ‘Einstein the Great has visited England, and delivered lectures to uncomprehending audiences . . . Einstein has taken his place in the newspapers with the comet, the sun-spots, the poisonous jellyfish and octopus at Margate, and other natural phenomena.’ In September he wrote: ‘The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the ages of logical science . . . in the sense that it was biology that influenced the imagination of non-scientific people. Darwin is the representative of those years, as Newton of the seventeenth, and Einstein perhaps of ours.’ By , Eliot was drawing a demarcation between his own attitudes and those of writers on religion and cosmology, like the Baron von Hügel, who lived and wrote before the paradigm shift wrought by the new physics:

‘Vacant interstellar spaces’



‘The alteration is too great for von Hügel to have understood, if he had lived longer. We have a different attitude towards science – we have had Einstein and Whitehead – and a new attitude towards religion’. The excitement surrounding the new physics amongst the discipline’s Anglophone popularisers occasionally bordered on rapture. Arthur Eddington gave public lectures, published textbooks, and made radio broadcasts. His The Nature of the Physical World () sold more than , copies in its first fourteen months and was reviewed by the ‘Criterion, The Listener, The Nation and Athenaeum, The New Statesman, and the TLS.’ James Jeans’s The Mysterious Universe () sold , copies in its first two months. The descriptions by physicists themselves often attained a visionary quality. Russell Kirk refers to a conversation in the s between Albert Einstein and St-John Perse (whose poem Anabasis Eliot translated and published in ): The scientist had invited the poet to Princeton to ask him a question: ‘How does a poet work? How does the idea of a poem come to him? How does this idea grow?’ St.-John Perse described the vast part played by intuition and by the subconscious. Einstein seemed delighted: ‘But it’s the same thing for the man of science,’ he said. ‘The mechanics of discovery are neither logical nor intellectual. It is a sudden illumination, almost a rapture.’

Eddington’s Space, Time and Gravitation () explained the general theory of relativity and recorded Eddington’s empirical confirmation, using the apparent displacement of stars during the solar eclipse on  May  as evidence that light bends around the sun. Eliot invited Eddington to write for the Criterion in  (although Eddington presumably declined, as no piece by him appeared). Eddington was both an eminent astrophysicist and a committed Quaker. He believed that investigating the positivist nature of the physical universe could lead to an harmonising of scientific and religious world-views, a science ‘bent through the lens of metaphysics’. He wrote that ‘whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead and the purpose urging in our nature responds.’ In these respects, Eddington’s discovery of the natural limit to the luminosity of stars exemplifies what Simon Schaffer describes as the modern quest for illumination: a fusing of the religious conception of light as divine knowledge and light as a physical phenomenon and force. Eddington’s light radiating outwards from its source in the darkness provides the complementary image to James’s torrent gushing forth from a subterranean fissure.



Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

The processes of poetic creation in Eliot’s work cannot be fully understood without a sense of their luminary and spatial dimensions. Much has been written about Eliot’s complex sense of time, but he wrote vividly, too, about light and darkness, heights and depths. Spatial metaphors are twinned with visual, as patterns of light illuminate the visual field within which the eye moves. Eliot used the metaphor of peripheral vision (and the related elusiveness of objects moving in space) to explain the influence of poetry: The influence of poetry, at the furthest periphery, is . . . very diffused, very indirect, and very difficult to prove. It is like following the course of a bird or an aeroplane in a clear sky: if you have seen it when it was quite near, and kept your eye on it as it flew farther and farther away, you can still see it at a great distance, a distance at which the eye of another person, to whom you try to point it out, will be unable to find it.

Poetic language has its own cosmography: scansion and metre together are a ‘simplified map of a complicated territory’. Several studies have referred to the reimagining of the new physics by modernist poets, although there is still great scope for further analysis. Julie M. Johnson analyses the impact of relativity in its debased form (‘everything is relative’) on Joyce, Frost, Faulkner, Wyndham Lewis, Archibald MacLeish, Sartre, and Lawrence Durrell. Katy Price writes that William Empson composed ‘metaphysical poetry after the example of John Donne: where Donne had framed his own entanglements within a Copernican setting, Empson . . . [situated his] in the universe described by Eddington’. Price’s Loving Faster Than Light () provides a muchneeded intellectual history of the middlebrow and popular responses to the physics of Einstein and Eddington, and touches on its penetration into literary intellectual circles. William Everdell’s The First Moderns () cites ‘discontinuity’ as modernism’s key theme and argues that the cultural seeds of this approach to the creation of art were sown by the disintegrative effects of neuroscience, number theory, and theoretical physics. In Critic as Scientist (), Ian F. A. Bell catalogues Pound’s usage of terms, images, and analogies borrowed from science, but views ‘Eliot’s use of science . . . [as] wholly imitative of Pound’s’. Ole Bay-Petersen maps Einstein’s concept of simultaneous ‘space-time’ onto the co-existent past, present, and future of ‘Burnt Norton’. Lawrence Durrell links ‘the relativity theory . . . with T. S. Eliot’s style . . . modern poetry . . . unconsciously reproduces something like the space-time continuum in the way that it uses words and phrases: and the way in which its forms are cyclic

‘Vacant interstellar spaces’



rather than extended.’ Katherine Ebury surveys the aesthetic responses of Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett to developments in physics and astronomy in Modernism and Cosmology (), noting Eliot’s Criterion editorials as instances of ‘modernist disdain for popular expositions of relativity’. Elsewhere, Ebury draws attention to the sidereal context of The Hollow Men, reading the poem as ‘a dream of combustion’ and suggesting, rightly, that Eliot found popular attempts to reconcile religion and cosmology ‘creatively enabling’. Whitworth’s Einstein’s Wake () suggests ‘the debates surrounding science in the war years and immediately after provide an important and largely overlooked context for T. S. Eliot’s thinking about the nature of poetry, tradition, and poetic knowledge.’ Whitworth’s thoughtful discussion of metaphor draws a link between scientific analysis and Eliot’s treatment of facts and his need to combine impersonal and personal elements in the processes of poetic creation. He quotes Eliot’s comment that the work of a great scientist who has allowed ‘a complete surrender of himself’ to the work ‘will [have] . . . a cachet of the man all over it’. This chapter traces the illuminating cross-currents between Eliot’s poetry, criticism, and the popular expressions of new physics he seemed, at times, so outspokenly suspicious of. It argues, first, that Eliot’s imaginative logic of the s and s was informed by older eschatological anxieties regarding the death of the sun, and, second, that Eliot’s dismissal of the ‘fairyland’ of modern physics (exemplified in his  essay ‘Thoughts after Lambeth’) belied a deeper imaginative engagement with its cosmological grammars. The nineteenth century was a period of immense scientific upheaval. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (–) confirmed the concept of geological ‘deep time’, first developed in the s by James Hutton. The geologists undermined Archbishop James Ussher’s seventeenth-century biblically inspired chronology, extending the scope of history beyond human consciousness. This newfound understanding coincided and conflicted with pioneering insights into solar life-cycles and dawning awareness that the sun’s energy is finite. In the s and s, the physicists William Thomson and Hermann von Helmholtz theorised the impending heat death of the universe (the point of maximum entropy, at which all heat is evenly distributed throughout the universe and thus all potential energy exhausted). Writing ‘On the Age of the Sun’s Heat’ (), Thomson applied these ‘general principles to the discovery of probable limits to the periods of time, past and future, during which the sun can be



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reckoned on as a source of heat and light.’ By , the astronomer Richard Proctor was writing (in a chapter titled ‘Suns in Flames’) of the ‘catastrophe’ of ‘a sun like our own . . . in conflagration’. In Open Fields (to which I am highly indebted) Gillian Beer discusses the ‘exchange, dialogue, misprision’, and ‘fugitive understanding’ that occurred across cultural and disciplinary boundaries with especial fecundity and prominence during the late nineteenth century. Beer takes her title from a passage in The Origin of Species that draws together evolution and psychology through the common imagery of illumination: In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.

Beer contrasts the progressive view of Darwinian theory ‘with its emphasis on development and upon increasing complexity as a means to sustained diversity of life’, with ‘the new physics (with its insistence on increasing disorder in entropy and on the running down of the sun, already in a period of desuetude).’ Fears of global cooling and solar death escaped their immediate context in the scientific literature and infiltrated mainstream Victorian culture. In ‘The Scientific Movement and Literature’ () Edward Dowden writes feelingly that ‘we anticipate a time when this earth will roll blind and cold around the sun, and all life upon our globe will be extinct.’ Beer finds elements of this anxiety in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung () and in works by William Morris, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, and H. G. Wells. Robert Macfarlane adds Samuel Butler, James Thomson, G. F. Watts, Thomas Huxley, and John Ruskin to this list, suggesting that ‘the daily death of the sun at sunset took on new and sinister resonances within fiction and poetry of the period. Old myths – especially the Norse myths of Ragnarok and Balder, in which a young hero dies in his youthful vigour – were rehabilitated, and used to trope the sun’s extermination.’ Beer cites the publication of Helmholtz’s essay Über die Erhaltung der Kraft () and James Frazer’s  edition of The Golden Bough as providing ‘rough end dates for the constellating activity’ of the solar death myth in mainstream consciousness. Yet related anxieties are still apparent in the cultural discourse of the early twentieth century. Virginia Woolf’s ‘On Being Ill’ (first published by Eliot in the January  Criterion) envisions a cold death for the solar system:

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The wave of life flings itself out indefatigable. It is only the recumbent who know what, after all, nature is at no pains to conceal – that she in the end will conquer; heat will leave the world; stiff with frost we shall cease to drag ourselves about the fields; ice will lie thick upon factory and engine; the sun will go out.

A short essay by D. H. Lawrence published in the December  Criterion also manifests this anxiety: In the north, man tends instinctively to imagine, to conceive that the sun is lighted like a candle, in an everlasting darkness, and that one day, the candle will go out, the sun will be exhausted, and the everlasting dark will resume uninterrupted sway. Hence, to the northerner, the phenomenal world is essentially tragical, because it is temporal, and must cease to exist.

An address given to the British Institute of Philosophy in  by Dean William Ralph Inge evidences the continuation of this anxiety into the s. Significantly entitled ‘The New Götterdämmerung’, Inge’s address gives a pessimistic account of the implications of astrophysics for students of philosophy, referencing Wagner and Tennyson, Eddington and Jeans, Bradley, Bergson, and William James. Disturbed by the lack of ‘finality’ in ‘the novel theories, which jostle one another’ with ‘ragged edges’, Inge is deeply preoccupied with entropy, invoking the myth of solar death in its Norse guise: ‘the end is certain. The race will die, and no memory of its history will survive anywhere . . . acosmism or pannihilism.’ Eliot had read Inge’s Studies of English Mystics and Christian Mysticism with sufficient interest as a graduate student to have compiled notecards, including a transcription of a passage on St John of the Cross’s imagery of light and darkness. He attacked Inge’s journalistic work in his Criterion ‘Commentary’ for April  and commissioned Bonamy Dobrée to review three works by Inge, which appeared in the Criterion in January . In  William Empson added an additional verse to his  love poem Letter I, in which the sun must either explode or become rapt in the dark cold of its own increasing density: Our jovial sun, if he avoids exploding (These times are critical), will cease to grin, Will lose your circumambient foreboding; Loose the full radiance his mass can win While packed with mass holds all that radiance in; Flame far too hot not to seem utter cold And hide a tumult never to be told.

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Eddington’s Stars and Atoms (), upon which Empson drew, gives a physicist’s explanation of this stellar paradox: ‘The final fate of the white dwarf is to become at the same time the hottest and the coldest matter in the universe . . . Because the star is intensely hot it has enough energy to cool down . . . because it is so intensely cold it has stopped radiating and no longer wants to grow any colder.’ No light radiating renders the star invisible. (The frontispiece of the first edition of Stars and Atoms reproduces a hydrogen photograph of the sun as a blackened particulate mass somewhere between an ink blot and a darkened constellation.) Fading and dying stars are a persistent motif in The Hollow Men (). The poem establishes an interplay between vision and illumination, light and life, weaving images of eyes, ‘direct’ and purposeful, with sunlight and ‘perpetual’ stars. These are set in contrast to the blind and vacant supplications of the ‘hollow men’. The purgatorial ‘twilight kingdom’ is dimly illuminated by memories of a dying star. The ‘dead land’ exists ‘Under the twinkle of a fading star’, the poem’s ‘paralysed force, gesture without motion’ recalling the entropy forecast to engulf the universe. The unattainable place of rest, ‘death’s other Kingdom’, repose of ‘those who have crossed / With direct eyes’, is imagined lit by ‘Sunlight on a broken column’. The untroubled eyes of the righteous are absent from the ‘valley of dying stars’, ‘last of meeting places’. Its denizens, with their strawstuffed heads and dry voices, can only grope blindly, in the faint hope that the redemptive eyes may be reconfigured: As the perpetual star Multifoliate rose Of death’s twilight kingdom

The conclusion combines a sing-song circular motion with an awareness of time lapsing (‘Here we go round the prickly pear / At five o’clock in the morning ’), as a shadow descends, a permanent eclipse: ‘This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper ’ (P –). In ‘Burnt Norton’, a moment of stillness and transcendence is abruptly extinguished by the sudden dark blot of a cloud against the sun (P ). Eliot was demonstrably keen to incorporate astronomical figures into ‘Little Gidding’. The lines that became ‘the dark dove with the flickering tongue / Had passed below the horizon of his homing’ initially described the dove’s ‘incomprehensible descension’. Eliot used the astronomical term ‘descension’ because, he wrote to John Hayward, ‘it means the disappearance of a star or planet below the horizon’. After replacing the line, he wrote, ‘I was sorry to surrender the word “descension” which you will

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discover from O.E.D. is an astronomical term’. He was quite aware of his own poetic assimilation of astronomical language, even where it had little mainstream circulation or meaning. ‘The uncertain hour before the morning’ holds a kernel of an ancient fear that the sun may never rise again. Beer describes the s and s as ‘the period when the elegant expositions of Eddington and Jeans, and the fame of Einstein, were communicating to non-scientists how modern physics crazed categories and dislimned boundaries.’ Victorian anxieties about the death of the sun were overlaid with new fears as to the potential disintegrative effect of advances in physics on the conceptual superstructure of the universe. Whitworth notes the popularity of the science journalist J. W. N. Sullivan as a promulgator of scientific ideas within literary circles: Sullivan discussed relativity with John Middleton Murry in April  and gave a ‘lucid explanation’ of ‘something he says is Einstein’ to a sceptical Pound in Paris in August . In  Sullivan wrote five articles in the Athenaeum explaining relativity theory and was due to contribute to the Criterion in late , although this did not eventuate. Like Murry’s Athenaeum, Eliot’s Criterion featured coverage of the new physics. In the January  edition Eliot’s fellow Faber board member Frank Morley attempted to restate the argument advanced by Einstein and Minkowski as to the finite velocity of light, and referred interested readers to Eddington’s Space, Time and Gravitation and The Mathematical Theory of Relativity. In the late s Eliot was acutely aware of and preoccupied by the interpenetration of scientific and literary discourses. In March  Eliot gave an address at the City Literary Institute in which he remarked on the increasingly scientific vernacular of Herbert Read’s critical idiom: Mr. Herbert Read . . . tells us that his is an inquiry into the evolution of poetry, and speaks presently of English poetry as a ‘living and developing organism.’ Even these few words should give a hint of the extent to which the critical apparatus has changed with the general changes in scientific and historical conceptions, when a literary critic can treat his audience to terms like ‘evolution’ and ‘living organism’ with the assurance of their being immediately apprehended. He is taking for granted certain vague but universal biological ideas.

The title of Eliot’s address, ‘Experiment in Criticism’, acknowledged and enacted this change. Three months later, writing in the June  edition of The Listener, he commented on Eddington’s prose style: You might compare [a passage from Bacon] with a paragraph from some good modern book explaining recent scientific theory to the general reader.

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Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space Take Professor Eddington’s new book, The Nature of the Physical World. There is no living scientist of anywhere near Mr. Eddington’s eminence who can write better English, precise, spare, lucid, and free from unnecessary technicalities.

Note that in both these moments of attentiveness to scientific linguistic and imaginative structures, Eliot uses the term ‘lucid’ (as did Pound describing Sullivan, quoted above). The reciprocal nature of the interaction is also a feature of Eddington’s explanatory mode. In Space, Time and Gravitation he drew a parallel between the endeavour of the critic writing about poetry and the scientist explaining the mysteries of relativity: As the language of a poet rings with a truth that eludes the clumsy explanations of his commentators, so the geometry of relativity in its perfect harmony expresses a truth of form and type in nature, which my bowdlerised version misses.

Such coverage was part of a broad intellectual commerce between art, philosophy, and science. Futurism (and Vorticism, its short-lived native counterpart) drew on the imaginative vocabularies of the new physics to develop a modern language of artistic creation centred on the smallest units of matter (Pound wrote in  of ‘the musical atom’). Responses to science within the humanities varied. The indeterminacies and infinite spaces of modern physics could be made to represent a liberation from the intellectual and artistic confinement of conservative structures. In an article suggestively titled ‘Dissolving Views’, Sullivan challenged the arts to assimilate the spatial scope of the physicist’s universe: If art is to survive it must show itself worthy to rank with science . . . To do that, it must become, to an unprecedented degree, profound and comprehensive, for it is living in a world which is unprecedentedly wide and deep.

In contrast, Daniel Albright argues that for Pound, Einstein’s theories suggested a ‘dream-like and evacuated’ reality whose literature was at continual risk of evaporation into ‘unsolid and unstable worlds’ of ‘randomly circulating energies’. Pound wrote of Wagner having ‘produced a sort of pea-soup, and that Debussy distilled it into a heavy mist, which the post-Debussians have desiccated into a diaphanous dust’. Put more harshly by Dean Inge, the result of the nuclear theory of atoms was that ‘Matter has . . . been defecated to a transparency’. In the late s and the s, Eliot became highly wary of ‘the scientific paladins of religion’. His evolving responses to Alfred North

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Whitehead’s two volumes of the mid-s – Science and the Modern World () and Religion in the Making () – exemplify both his interest and his ambivalence. Eliot greatly respected Whitehead as mathematician, logician, and co-author with Bertrand Russell of the Principia Mathematica (–). He had read the first volume when it appeared in , and perceived it to be ‘of inestimable value to culture’. In his  Clark Lectures he described the Principia Mathematica as ‘an admirable influence . . . for the writing of English prose or verse’. Such observations make evident Eliot’s interest in the formal properties of Whitehead’s writing (in particular its clarity of style) as well as the substance of its logic. In the s Whitehead became increasingly interested in the philosophy of science and, eventually, metaphysics – he would go on to pioneer the development of process philosophy. He proposed an alternate theory of gravity in response to Einstein’s general relativity in The Principle of Relativity (). His The Concept of Nature () advances a process-driven ontology, viewing the world as organic rather than materialistic and emphasising the deep interdependency of dynamic events (rather than objects) in nature. Science and the Modern World, drawn largely from Whitehead’s  Lowell Lectures at Harvard, is ‘a study of some aspects of Western culture during the past three centuries, insofar as it has been influenced by science.’ The book extends Whitehead’s critique of scientific materialism and what he terms ‘The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’, ‘the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete’. Whitehead’s analysis of the interpenetration of science, philosophy, and literature contributed to the sense of dissolution endemic to these discourses during the s: reality is ‘a structure of evolving processes’, and ‘everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world’. Eliot was impressed by Science and the Modern World, writing to Ottoline Morrell in early : ‘I think that Whitehead’s book is very fine though I have not yet read it thoroughly.’ Despite this, he wrote playfully to Richard Aldington a fortnight later: a philosopher should be as well informed about science as possible, but philosophy by scientists is as bad as science by philosophers: even Whitehead flounders . . . But when I say that a philosopher ought to know as much science as possible . . . I mean, because, unless you know a good deal about science, you don’t know enough to AVOID it . . . To come down to brass tacks, I don’t believe that the study of Science is going to help one to write better poetry.

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Given that Eliot was concurrently commissioning Herbert Read to write a review of Science and the Modern World and Whitehead’s follow-up Religion in the Making (), it is possible that his comments to Aldington are to some extent coloured by an antipathy to the latter book’s attempts to regain a theologically grounded sense of permanence amid cosmological change. Indeed, in a  letter Eliot describes Science and the Modern World as ‘a very brilliant piece of work’ while also recommending Eddington and Jeans to his correspondent. Eliot’s sensitivity to scientific incursions into theology was greatest in the years surrounding his conversion to Anglicanism in June . He wrote a mordant review of Science and the Modern World and Religion in the Making for the March  issue of Wyndham Lewis’s The Enemy. Although it is unclear why it did not appear, Eliot expressed dissatisfaction with the piece, and it remained unpublished until . The review acknowledges both books’ historical insight, but bridles at their theological generalising: Professor Whitehead’s two recent books, Science and the Modern World and Religion in the Making, have been received with acclamation. Indeed they deserve it; Dr. Whitehead has a power of lucid exposition of the most difficult subjects, great historical knowledge and ability to generalise his knowledge. He has a rare and remarkable combination of ability. It is remarkable that so eminent a mathematician and physicist should also have an historical mind. It would be still more remarkable to find that he had, in addition, a theological mind.

Eliot was angered by what he perceived as Whitehead’s reduction of religion to a ‘gelded abstraction’ born, he felt, of Whitehead’s being ‘merely the descendant of Christians’. The review makes no mention of the main substance of Science and the Modern World. It is entirely focussed on Whitehead’s chapter ‘Religion and Science’. Eliot resists the phantasmal character of Whitehead’s abstract titular opposition and takes aim at the ‘soporific elixirs’ of Whitehead’s vague, syncretist characterisation of God as a principle of concretisation and order. This is, he writes, ‘merely the [William] James view of God, the Bergson view of Freedom, warmed over for a rather more exacting generation’. Eliot maintained the pitch of his hostility (and interest) during the years leading into the early s. In  he was planning an edition of the Criterion ‘in which the Whitehead matter will be thrashed out’, although this did not eventuate. In , he made several unsuccessful attempts to enlist the Cambridge philosopher R. B. Braithwaite to write a booklet for the Criterion Miscellany attacking religious physics popularised by

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Whitehead and Eddington. Eliot’s desire to proselytise his passionate refutation suggests his deep preoccupation with the implications of Whitehead’s and Eddington’s metaphysics, and his imaginative engagement with their writing. The genealogy of theological error Eliot traces for Whitehead (incorporating Arnold, William James, and Bergson) reveals a strained sense of intellectual kinship beneath the antagonism. ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I’, Eliot seems to be saying. In the Norton Lectures Eliot dismisses ‘popular astronomy books (like Sir James Jeans’s)’ whose only effect upon him is to convey ‘the insignificance of vast space’ (UP ). But it is in ‘Thoughts after Lambeth’ () that he vents his strongest spume. Eliot imagines a hypothetical encyclical issued jointly by ‘Mr H. G. Wells, Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Russell; or Professors Whitehead, Eddington and Jeans; or Dr. Freud, Dr. Jung and Dr. Adler’ offering ‘peeps into the fairy-land of Reality.’ The strength of ill-feeling was occasioned by the Lambeth Conference’s statement that ‘there is much in the scientific and philosophic thinking of our time which provides a climate more favourable to faith in God than has existed for generations.’ Eliot protested that scientists ‘cannot confirm anyone in the faith; they can merely have the practical value of removing prejudices from the minds of those who have not the faith but who might possibly come to it’. Eddington had made precisely this point in his  Gifford Lectures: The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory; at least it is in harmony with it. But if so, all that our inquiry justifies us in asserting is a purely colourless pantheism.

Science cannot provide any proof of a ‘World-Spirit’ – or insights into its possible nature – it can only ‘presuppose a background outside the scope of its investigations’, ‘an environment dimly felt in moments of exaltation’. (It seems unfair to take Eddington to task for trespassing into the realms of philosophy. He was, after all, ‘required by the terms of the Gifford Lectures to touch on questions of natural theology.’) Eliot included a review by John MacMurray of The Nature of the Physical World in the July  Criterion. MacMurray agrees ‘with the public feeling’ that Eddington’s book ‘makes history’ in its rejection of ‘the substantial character of matter’ and attendant materialist determinism. Eddington’s New Pathways in Science () was reviewed in less sympathetic terms by Montgomery Belgion in the July  Criterion. Belgion accuses Eddington of idealism and critiques Eddington’s book for

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rehashing material from The Nature of the Physical World, The Expanding Universe, and an essay Eddington published in Needham’s Science, Religion and Reality in , all of which suggests that Belgion at least was highly familiar with the physicist’s oeuvre. Yet even in Belgion’s chosen extracts, Eddington is demonstrably careful to limit the scope of his enquiry to a quantitative study of recurrences in the laws of nature: ‘whether we describe them by words or by symbols their intrinsic nature remains unknown . . . we can describe a structure without specifying the materials used’. Despite his suspicion of scientists who used their ‘accomplishment in one field as the justification for theorizing about the world in general’, Eliot found much of interest in the work of Einstein, Eddington, Whitehead, and their colleagues, when quarantined from matters of faith. Even as he deprecates the ‘latest popular ramp of bestsellers’, Eliot includes a footnote reproducing in full a Times report of a lecture in which Einstein signalled his acceptance of the Hubble–Tolman theory that the universe is expanding. That Eliot had read and retained the Times article suggests something of his interest in the developing image of the universe. He translated Charles Mauron’s ‘On Reading Einstein’ for inclusion in the Criterion in , targeting scorn at the scientific popularisers preoccupied with ‘derivative’ theories, and praising the daring of relativist physicists Lorentz and Poincaré. Their ‘correct attitude’ (investigating the operation of unseen forces, while making no attempt at qualitative analysis) is ‘a whole evolution of the mind’. Eliot elaborated in a  radio broadcast: it is not science that has destroyed religious belief, but our preference of unbelief that has made illegitimate use of science . . . I am not criticising the attitudes of the eminent scientists themselves; nor am I criticising their more popular books, which even I can understand in part, and some of which I have read with pleasure and I hope profit. I instance Sir James Jeans’ The Mysterious Universe and Professor Eddington’s Science and the Unseen World . . . But it is clear that the popular attitude of hailing modern physical science as a support of religion is very misguided.

As Jason Harding writes, ‘Eliot . . . could share Pascal’s awe at the silence of astronomical immensities, but . . . did not believe that modern science had antiquated religion.’ Nor did he believe physics could save it from cultural obsolescence. Eliot’s fertile intellectual commerce with Whitehead extended beyond theology and metaphysics into the realms of aesthetics and literary criticism, where it cast fugitive shadows across his own work. In May  Eliot wrote to the journalist J. M. Robertson: ‘my prejudices [against

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Shelley] have only been strengthened recently by reading Professor Whitehead’s praise of that author in his Science and the Modern World. If Shelley is science, then science is one of my lost illusions.’ Eliot’s criticism relates to Whitehead’s chapter ‘The Romantic Reaction’, which considers Wordsworth and Shelley as contrastive versions of a Romantic literary rejection of scientific materialism. It attributes Wordsworth’s hostility to science (captured in the phrase ‘We murder to dissect’) to his haunting by the enormous permanences of ‘nature in solido ’. Shelley’s receptivity to science is described as ‘part of the main structure of his mind, permeating his poetry through and through’, but both poets are understood to ‘bear witness to a prehensile unification as constituting the very being of nature’, thereby rejecting ‘the abstract materialism of science.’ While it is true that Whitehead reads a passage from Prometheus Unbound as evidence of a diagrammatic understanding of geometry, he never holds Shelley up as a poetic representative of science. Rather, he seeks to expose the shortcomings of a philosophy of science that cannot accommodate the structures of imagination and experience discernible in Shelley’s poetry. Eliot’s comment to Robertson seems at best careless, and at worst a wilful mischaracterisation. Whitehead’s method of reading Shelley and Wordsworth is to pay attention to the structural tonalities of their poetry. He writes that ‘Shelley thinks of nature as changing, dissolving, transforming as it were at a fairy’s touch. The leaves fly before the West Wind,’ and he observes that in ‘The Cloud it is the transformations of water which excite his imagination . . . the endless, eternal, elusive change of things’. It seems to me that Eliot’s sneering caricature in ‘Thoughts after Lambeth’ – of Whitehead and his fellows offering ‘peeps into the fairy-land of Reality’ – is obliquely directed against this moment in Whitehead. This seems strange, given the context for Whitehead’s discussion is not theological but aesthetic and imaginative. Yet however unlikely, it is clear that Whitehead’s discussion of poetic responses to science – and of Shelley in particular – continued to rankle. In December , Eliot gave a talk at St. George’s, Bloomsbury, in support of the organ repair fund, ‘on Whitehead’s appreciation of poetry’. The talk was subsequently published in The Bookman as ‘Poetry and Propaganda’. Eliot returns to Whitehead’s chapter on Shelley and Wordsworth and is careful to limit the scope of his engagement to a single passage in Whitehead’s chapter, which he quotes: The literature of the nineteenth century, especially its English poetic literature, is a witness to the discord between the aesthetic intuitions of



Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space mankind and the mechanism of science. Shelley brings vividly before us the elusiveness of the eternal objects of sense as they haunt the change which infects underlying organisms. Wordsworth is the poet of nature as being the field of enduring permanences carrying within themselves a message of tremendous significance. The eternal objects are also there for him, ‘The light that never was, on sea or land.’ Both Shelley and Wordsworth emphatically bear witness that nature cannot be divorced from its aesthetic values; and that these values arise from the cumulation, in some sense, of the brooding presence of the whole onto its various parts. Thus we gain from the poets the doctrine that a philosophy of nature must concern itself at least with these six notions: change, value, eternal objects, endurance, organism, interfusion.

Eliot takes understandable exception to Whitehead’s flawed inductive leap from Wordsworth and Shelley to poets as a category, and to his clumsy generalising about the literature of the nineteenth century. But there is an unsettling urgency about his riposte to this passage, which he calls ‘dangerous nonsense’: I should not however have devoted this space merely to the churlish pleasure of attacking a famous man; but because I believe that the theory of poetry implicit in Whitehead’s chapter is dangerous, because we could prove by it, choosing our examples judiciously, almost anything we like.

Eliot’s critique of Whitehead’s ‘religious physics’ and his attack on Whitehead’s ‘appreciation of poetry’ have in common an objection to what Eliot perceives as Whitehead’s utilitarian appropriation of one text or idea in support of another. Just as you cannot use physics to prove God, Eliot believed, you cannot conscript poetry to bolster doctrine: Poetry cannot prove that anything is true; it can only create a variety of wholes composed of intellectual and emotional constituents, justifying the emotion by the thought and the thought by the emotion: it proves successively, or fails to prove, that certain worlds of thought and feeling are possible. It provides intellectual sanction for feeling, and [a]esthetic sanction for thought.

Behind the practitioner’s fear of misuse, Eliot’s rebuttal exhibits a strange rhetorical blindness, burying Whitehead’s intent beneath a pedant’s terminological objections. Whitehead’s analysis (of which this passage is only a partial, decontextualised segment) introduces ‘the testimony of great poets’ as expressive of ‘deep intuitions’ of human experience. He argues that philosophy is ‘the survey of the sciences’, working to harmonise them and bring them to unity. Such harmony must admit of the aesthetic

‘Vacant interstellar spaces’

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intuitions of poetry – in Eliot’s phrase, that ‘certain worlds of thought and feeling are possible’. Change, value, eternal objects, endurance, organism, interfusion: these concepts operate at the level of systemic interaction within the poetic (and, by extension, the human) imagination. Eliot’s focus on the grammatical ineptitudes of Whitehead’s search for poetic truth-values obscures the commonalities of their positions. Whitehead celebrates Wordsworth’s poetry as embodying ‘entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others.’ Eliot’s response is more in sympathy than in strife: For poetry . . . is not the assertion that something is true, but the making that truth more fully real to us; it is the creation of a sensuous embodiment. It is the making the Word Flesh, if we remember that for poetry there are various qualities of Word and various qualities of Flesh.

The following passage from the opening of Choruses from ‘The Rock’ () seems to draw its energies and imaginative vocabulary from Eliot’s contentious dealings with Whitehead (P ): The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven, The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit. O perpetual revolution of configured stars, O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons, O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying! The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to GOD. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

The passage makes implicit critique of idealism’s ‘endless cycle of idea and action’, which it links to the cosmologist’s ‘perpetual revolution of configured stars’. Scientific epistemological structures (‘endless invention, endless experiment’) yield a limited, fatal knowledge (‘knowledge of motion, but not of stillness’). In its theological burden, in the tenor and terms of its spiritual failure, and even in the emphatic quality of its lumpen semantics

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the passage is an obsessed and passionate response to the religious physics of Whitehead’s cosmology. Discoveries in quantum theory and astrophysics in the s overlaid the theory of relativity with microcosmic significance. Eddington explained the principles of relativity in two articles in Nature in March . His descriptions provided an alternate model of creative process – as a scattering of light outwards, and a corresponding inner void – which stood in contrast to the Darwinian biological model of adaptive progress. He describes ‘a tremendous wind of aether, blowing . . . through us . . . it has gradually appeared that matter is of an electrical nature, and the forces of cohesion between the particles . . . are electrical forces.’ In The Expanding Universe () he writes that ‘according to relativity theory the complete field of force contains besides the ordinary Newtonian attraction a repulsive (scattering) force varying directly as the distance’. Although Einstein produced his general theory of relativity in , it was finally tested in  by Eddington’s expedition to photograph the solar eclipse. Eliot’s ‘Ben Jonson’ (published in the Times Literary Supplement on  November ) demonstrates his awareness of the terminology and imaginative constructs of the new physics. Eliot refers to the Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky, who pioneered non-Euclidean hyperbolic geometry in the s: the erasure of Euclid’s classical geometry was a key element in the shifting perspectives and rootless surfaces of twentieth-century physics. The essay is preoccupied with the disjuncture between superficial solidity and internal emptiness – an apparition of the subatomic void. It characterises the verse of Beaumont and Fletcher as ‘hollow’ and ‘superficial with a vacuum behind it’. Jonson’s ‘superficies . . . is solid.’ Eliot positions Jonson at the centre of a world the playwright had created, much as Eddington situates the observer at the centre of any world he attempts to measure. In each case, the outer contours and internal properties of the world hold good only within the observer/creator’s frame of reference: We cannot call a man’s work superficial when it is the creation of a world; a man cannot be accused of dealing superficially with the world which he himself has created; the superficies is the world. Jonson’s characters conform to the logic of the emotions of their world. It is a world like Lobatchevsky’s; the worlds created by artists like Jonson are like systems of non-Euclidean geometry. They are not fancy, because they have a logic of their own; and this logic illuminates the actual world, because it gives us a new point of view from which to inspect it. 

‘Vacant interstellar spaces’



Michael Whitworth points out that Eliot removed this paragraph from subsequent iterations of the essay on ‘Ben Jonson’, a decision Katy Price attributes to Eliot’s reticence about being ‘too closely associated with popular talk of the fourth dimension.’ This may be the reason, although there may also be something in the unwary confidence of the extract’s equation of literary cosmology and hyperbolic geometry that gave the older Eliot pause. Typically, Eliot’s assimilation (and occasional appropriation) of scientific vocabularies is a more fugitive process. Eliot’s  essay ‘A Sceptical Patrician’ (reviewing Henry Adams’s autobiography) provides a useful example of his subtlety of derivation, the series of transmissive removes at which his imagination necessarily operated. Eliot begins with a genealogy of Adams that is both biological and philosophical in its concerns, and – given the patrician familial parallels (Eliot described Adams as a ‘cousin’) – constitutes an obliquely self-focussed meditation. Eliot ruminates on the literary mind of New England, its Unitarian roots, and its struggle against the ‘narrowness of the Boston horizon’. He links Adams’s foray into the Old World with Henry James, ‘a man whom he now and then reminds us of’. When Eliot describes the ‘dissolvent’ scepticism that is ‘a product, or a cause, or a concomitant, of Unitarianism’, he is describing his own native metaphysic as much as Adams’s. In this context, he makes reference to the physicist Henri Poincaré as a newer and more fatally dissolvent agent: Wherever this man [Adams] stepped, the ground did not simply give way, it flew into particles; towards the end of his life he came across the speculations of Poincaré, and science disappeared, entirely.

Poincaré was, of course, the presiding star of the St Louis World’s Fair that both Eliot and Adams had attended some fifteen years earlier. It is tempting to find more of Eliot than Adams in this complicated play of relation and transference. Certainly, Eliot’s participatory response to Adams’s reminiscence of the New England landscape finds its way into ‘Gerontion’, the poem he was writing at about the same time. The explosive force of the particles in Eliot’s description of Adams extends beyond the bounds of the critical text. Liberated from its more explicit associations and subject to further depredation, the image is the ghostly matter behind the ‘fractured atoms’ of ‘Gerontion’. Completed in mid-, ‘Gerontion’ () is a poem about emptiness, decay, and dispersion. Its antecedents are, like the poem itself, complex and granular (it owes something, surely, to Coleridge’s description of Othello ’s Roderigo: ‘the want of character and the power of the passions – like



Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

the wind loudest in empty houses – form his character’). But the specific forms of its porous structures of representation mirror a world of ‘fractured atoms’ and draw on the conceptual shifts and solar winds of modern physics. Its elision of the draughty spaces of the house with the dull thoughts in the ‘dry brain’ of the speaker creates a symmetry of microcosmic and macrocosmic vacancy. In , the nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford had shown, as Eddington would later write, that ‘the atom is as porous as the solar system.’ When Rutherford succeeded in splitting the atom in , he revealed a microcosmic world of swirling energies with the statement ‘I have broken the machine and touched the ghost of matter.’ Reflecting on that discovery in , Eddington found that the most arresting change is not the rearrangement of space and time by Einstein but the dissolution of all that we regard as most solid into tiny specks floating in void . . . The revelation by modern physics of the void within the atom is more disturbing than the revelation by astronomy of the immense void of interstellar space.

The wind pervading ‘Gerontion’ is not the breath of God, nor the black wind of the Inferno. It is vacancy-in-motion, a draught of nothingness that fragments and disintegrates (‘draughty house’, ‘windy knob’, ‘vacant shuttles / Weave the wind’, ‘driven by the Trades’) (P –). The dynamics of ‘Gerontion’ can be characterised as a series of spirallings outwards, an endless scattering (‘wilderness of mirrors’, ‘multiply variety’) towards a final entropic decay. The speaker is ‘an old man driven by the Trades / To a sleepy corner’. In the vacant expansions of the poem’s ‘windy spaces’ all momentum and passion is lost: ‘I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: / How should I use it for your closer contact?’ The poem’s unstable architecture (‘My house is a decayed house’) is revealed to be a decaying mental construct: the ‘cunning passages, contrived corridors’ of history and memory are the ‘Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.’ In a similar vein, in March  Eddington had written: ‘We mean by space and time simply a scaffolding that we construct as the result of our measures’; when overtaken by new pressures and developments ‘the scaffolding may easily go crooked.’ The ‘universe’ of ‘Gerontion’ correlates with Eddington’s description of ‘island universes’ that ‘wreathe themselves in spirals’. Towards the poem’s end, its insubstantial denizens are: . . . whirled Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn . . .

‘Vacant interstellar spaces’



In his March  Nature article, Eddington looks to the star Arcturus (known as the ‘Bear Guardian’ due to its position adjacent to Ursa Major, Eliot’s ‘shuddering Bear’) to explain time as the fourth dimension: ‘We must then imagine each star carrying its own appropriate space and time according to its motion through the aether.’ Eddington quotes Minkowski’s famous  conclusion: ‘Henceforth Space and Time in themselves vanish to shadows’. In Eliot’s poem, the constellated movement acquires a centrifugal force, whirling outwards, so that even the stars shudder under the dispersive pressure of their isolation. In a  article in the Times, Eddington wrote: ‘In astronomy, just as in physics and biology, discontinuity has lately come into much prominence.’ As ‘Gerontion’ shows, Eliot’s response to the fracturing of matter was rather more complicated than Dean Inge’s (but has commonalities with Woolf’s  ‘incessant shower of innumerable atoms’). He was certainly frightened by the ‘the void that I find in the middle of all human happiness and all human relations.’ His preoccupation with a perceived vacuity at the heart of things (of which, admittedly, Rutherford and Eddington’s empty atoms are only one manifestation) drove his religious urge, as he wrote to Paul Elmer More in : ‘I am one whom the sense of void tends to drive towards asceticism or sensuality, and only Christianity helps to reconcile me to life which is otherwise disgusting.’ Daniel Albright, writing about the infusion of wave and particle metaphors into modernist poetics, suggests that Eliot’s Christian conversion resulted in ‘the replacement of a poetics of swimming with a poetics of dancing.’ Albright suggests that the oceanic sensibility of the early poetry is replaced in the poetry of the s by the new orthodoxy of ‘Christ-particles’, according to which ‘movement grows precise and patterned, choreographed’. Although Albright’s models are suggestive, I disagree with his characterisation of the ‘particle-aesthetic’ as deriving from an ‘exterior order’. For Eliot, particles are not ordered, but nebulous, their massed porosity signalling the gaps and voids between. Particulate dust – that withering, chafing agent of disease and disassociation – had been a feature of the industrialising cityscape of St Louis. During Eliot’s Missourian childhood, bituminous coal dust and brick dust combined with flax and jute (from bagging factories) and grain swill (from brewing) to silt the air. As in the bitter particulate winds of ‘Gerontion’, their movement driven by vagaries of current, Eliot’s particles occupy the dispersive end of a spectrum extending in the other direction towards monadism and divine unity.

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Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

In the poems written from about  onwards, an intensity of interest appears in exploring the spaces between and inside things. These interstices may be terrifying (as in the void) or may be profound (‘the stillness / Between two waves of the sea’). In reviewing More’s The Demon of the Absolute (), Eliot writes that ‘there are, for the author of this book, certain absolute differences or gaps in the universe such as the gap between living and inanimate, or between mind and matter.’ Eliot goes on approvingly to liken More’s ‘theory of gaps’ to T. E. Hulme’s ‘theory of discontinuity’, suggested in Hulme’s posthumously published Speculations. Eliot quotes Hulme thus: We constantly tend to think that the discontinuities in nature are only apparent, and that a fuller investigation would reveal the underlying continuity. This shrinking from a gap or jump in nature has developed to a degree which paralyses any objective perception, and prejudices our seeing things as they really are . . . Our principle concern . . . should be the reestablishment of the temper or disposition of mind which can look at a gap or chasm without shuddering.

The patterned intricacies of Eliot’s later poetry – Albright’s choreographed particles – are an extension of the polyvalent conceptual rhyming of star and atom, mind and solar system so evident in Eliot’s pre-Christian poetry. The first instance occurs in Eliot’s  poem ‘The Burnt Dancer’, which extrapolates the ragged dance of a moth around a flame into a cosmological drama drawing its dark energies from ‘a distant star’. In a movement characteristic of contemporary responses to similar confluences in atomic physics, the moth’s interstellar dance transposes into the consciousness of the speaker: ‘Within the circle of my brain / The twisted dance continues’ (P –). Compare Eddington’s British Association Discourse on the structural symmetries between stars and atoms (published as Stars and Atoms in ), and the related parallel evolution of scientific understanding of both: The advance in our knowledge of atoms and radiation has led to many interesting developments in astronomy; and reciprocally the study of matter in the extreme conditions prevailing in stars and nebulae has played no mean part in the progress of atomic physics . . . our thought fluctuates continually from the excessively great to the excessively small, from the star to the atom and back to the star.

‘Marina’ (), a poem fogged with the unknowing and the unknown, contains post-conversion echoes of the twisted sidereal dance of ‘The Burnt Dancer’. The dissolutions of the later poem are enacted through

‘Vacant interstellar spaces’



grace, but dissolutions they remain. This poem represents the strongest realisation of an intertidal poetics in Eliot’s oeuvre (we are a long way from Christ-particles here). Present, too, is the mirroring of star and atom, mind and orbit, ‘more distant than stars and nearer than the eye’ (P ). The poem’s latent idealism situates it in a contemporary discourse within and between physics and metaphysics that drew inspiration from aesthetic traditions probing the limits of science and art. In his  Swarthmore Lecture, Eddington attempted to make sense of the dualism of spirit and matter in relation to the human brain, not by excavating either in search of an underlying unity, but by assuming that the gulf between the two is filled with some mysterious intermediary process, neither wholly ideal nor material. Between the calm clarity of ‘activity of thought and sensation’ as experienced and the underlying ‘maelstrom of scurrying atoms and electric charges’ as measured, Eddington describes ‘the dance of atoms in the brain’. Eliot prefigured Eddington’s image in the April  Criterion, suggesting that ‘anyone who would penetrate to the spirit of dancing . . . should track down the secrets of rhythm in the . . . science of neurology.’ An anonymous Criterion review of Stars and Atoms () highlights Eddington’s use of a related figure: ‘Besides atoms and ether waves, there is a third population to join in the dance.’ Eddington’s phrases, foreshadowed by Eliot in , picked up by the Criterion reviewer in , and repeated by the physicist in , call to mind lines from ‘Burnt Norton’. The symmetry of the ‘dance along the artery’ and ‘the circulation of the lymph’, ‘figured in the drift of stars’, reflects the same rotational consciousness of fixity and flux (P ). As a scientist, Eddington embraced the uncertain (‘the best we can do [is] to string together fragmentary knowledge’). This attitude is in sympathy with Eliot’s process of composition, reaction against overweening attempts at explanation, and instinct that there are some ‘depths into which we cannot peer’ (UP ). Eddington finds a ‘quiet joy’ in the movement of wind across the surface of water, but is hesitant to ‘subject it to introspection . . . By introspection, we drag out the truth for external survey; but in the mystical feeling the truth is apprehended from within and is, as it should be, a part of ourselves.’ The poet and the physicist possessed a shared instinct that the motion that determines the hidden movements of the universe – indeed, that accounts for its creation – is governed by an uncommon grace, a cosmic dance. This commonality of instinct is all the more significant because it led both men to a flirtation with mentalism, despite Eddington’s scientific

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Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

pragmatism and Eliot’s prior rejection of F. H. Bradley’s neo-Idealism. Jewel Spears Brooker has pointed to the presence in ‘Gerontion’ of Bradlean Idealism, which understands reality as inhering only in that which can be thought. I suggest in addition that the hints of mentalism in Eliot’s poetry owe something to the physics of Jeans, Eddington, and Whitehead. In this intermingling of science and art, it might be thought surprising that The Tempest should have any presence. Yet this drama is highly concerned with testing the nature and limits of ‘art’ and ‘science’ (as the Renaissance understood it). Prospero’s view of the world as an ‘insubstantial pageant’ had something of a resurgence in the early twentieth century, linked to the bewilderments of modern physics. One commentator writing in the Dial in  assumes an automatic progression from the new physics to solipsism: These new concepts of space and time bid fair to produce a revolution in philosophical thought considerably greater than that caused by the displacement of the earth from the center of the universe by Copernicus . . . Are we on the point of discovering that the only reality is thought-consciousness?

This view was founded on late Victorian cultural pessimism: The spaces of the past are strewn with wrecks of dead empires, as the abysses where the stars wander are strewn with the dust of vanished systems, sunk without sound in the havoc of the aeons.

The writer repining here on the eventual fate of Empire evokes the destruction and burial of Prospero’s staff ‘deeper than did ever plummet sound’. Gillian Beer argues that Frazer was unable to assimilate the new scientific visions of the future into The Golden Bough, and that his evocation of Prospero at the conclusion to the abridged  edition represents a ‘comforting fabulatory dissolution’: however vast the increase of knowledge and of power which the future may have in store for man, he can scarcely hope to stay the sweep of those great forces which seem to be making silently but relentlessly for the destruction of all this starry universe in which our earth swims as a speck or mote . . . Yet the philosopher . . . may console himself by reflecting that these gloomy apprehensions, like the earth and the sun themselves, are only parts of that unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up out of the void, and that the phantoms which the subtle enchantress has evoked to-day she may ban to-morrow. They too, like so much that to common eyes seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.

‘Vacant interstellar spaces’



In fact, as Frazer’s final sentence suggests, he was well aware of the dispersive, ephemeral nature of matter revealed by nuclear physics. He writes of the modern world as ‘cracked and seamed, sapped and mined with rents and fissures and yawning crevasses’. These are violent incarnations of ethereal energies: Prospero’s ‘thin air’ becomes the hissing sulphurous steam that rends The Waste Land, as it ‘cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air’ (P ). Recourse to mentalism was not a sign of retrograde denial, but a consequence of the unstable subatomic world itself. Eddington, for example, wrote: The stuff of the world is mind-stuff . . . It is difficult for the matterof-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference . . . 

James Jeans took a similar position: I incline to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derivative from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe . . . In general the universe seems to me to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine. It may well be, it seems to me, that each individual consciousness ought to be compared to a brain-cell in a universal mind.

Such radical agnosticism as to the status of the world of objects echoes Eliot’s proto-solipsism, especially as evident in his early doctoral thesis on Bradley. ‘Gerontion’ opens with an epigraph from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: Thou hast nor youth nor age But as it were an after dinner sleep Dreaming of both. (III.i.–)

The conjunction of house and brain in the poem and the exponential enlargement of the poem’s imaginative scale (from the cramped, dull thoughts of a single mind to the windy spaces of the house to the ‘contrived corridors of history’, circumscribed by human awareness, to the ‘circuit of the shuddering Bear’) suggest a convergence with Jeans’s ‘brain-cell in a universal mind’. The ‘fractured atoms’ rend the fabric of the poem’s reality; the ‘vacant shuttles’ weaving the wind are un-loomed vessels of the mind’s imaginings.

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Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

‘East Coker’ imagines another world of superannuated fragments: As, in a theatre, The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness, And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away –

(P )

The most striking thing about these deliberative, artful involutions of ‘darkness on darkness’ is the sense of dissolution, of a melting away of the material world, recalling Prospero’s speech at the abrupt conclusion of his masque in The Tempest. The astronomical dimension of these lines becomes clear when set against Eliot’s cosmographic vision of the development of poetry as described in : we observe . . . the same scene, but in a different and more distant perspective; there are new and strange objects in the foreground, to be drawn accurately in proportion to the more familiar ones which now approach the horizon, where all but the most eminent become invisible to the naked eye. (UP )

The passage envisages the poetic past as an interstellar field of vision, a ‘vast panorama’, where ‘new and strange objects’ are brought into focus by a new and powerful magnifying glass that can ‘sweep the distance’. Yet an opposed image persists in Eliot’s writing. In a world of dynamic light and dancing atoms, there can be no fixed ‘position and proportion’ for the objects surrounding us. (Eddington wrote in , ‘Our perceptions are crude measures . . . our perception of space is very largely a matter of optical measures with the eyes’.) Eliot was forced to acknowledge the presence of those emotions, and states of soul which are to be found . . . beyond the limit of the visible spectrum of human feeling, and which can be experienced only in moments of illumination, or by the development of another organ of perception other than that of everyday vision.

Unlike Bradley, Eddington grounded his mentalism in Shakespeare’s language of air and vision, adopting Prospero’s language to describe the universe as ‘substance . . . melted into shadow’: The absolute world is of so different a nature, that the relative world, with which we are acquainted, seems almost like a dream. But if indeed we are dreaming, our concern is with the baseless fabric of our vision.

‘Vacant interstellar spaces’



Explaining ‘the porosity of matter’, he describes the empty space between atoms as ‘airy nothing’. The phrase brings along with it the allusive richness of Duke Theseus’s speech: The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.ii.–)

Translating Mauron’s ‘On Reading Einstein’, Eliot employs the phrase ‘airy plumes’ in relation to the ‘mathematical fantasies’ that proliferate around the ‘unrealized worlds’ of non-Euclidean geometry. The essay ends by asking ‘who knows whether our successors will not see matter as invested with a new magic, more correct but stranger than the phantasmagoria of old? “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .”.’ Faced with a new universe in which the distance between two objects depends upon where one stands, Eliot assimilated Prospero’s wonder and frustration at the ‘dark backward and abysm of time’ into which the eye peers in vain. As he said of Shakespeare, the deeper aspects ‘do not come to light at once’. Notes  [A Lyric] ‘If Time and Space, as Sages Say’, P . First published in the Smith Academy Record / ( Apr. ). The manuscript (held by King’s College, Cambridge) is dated  Jan. .  ‘Landscapes: IV. Rannoch, by Glencoe’, P .  See Tatsushi Narita, ‘How Far Is T. S. Eliot from Here? The Young Poet’s Imagined World of Polynesian Matahiva’, in Theo D’Haen et al. (eds.), How Far Is America from Here? Selected Proceedings of the First World Congress of the International American Studies Association (Amsterdam, – May ), pp. –; and Ronald Bush, ‘The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic Thinking/Literary Politics’, in Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (eds.), Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism (Stanford, ), pp. –.  Henri Poincaré, ‘The Principles of Mathematical Physics’, in Congress of Arts and Science, Universal Exposition, St. Louis,  (Boston, ), pp. –.  William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of TwentiethCentury Thought (Chicago, ), p. .  Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Henry Cabot Lodge (Raleigh, ), pp. –.



Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

 ‘A Sceptical Patrician’: A Review of The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (), Prose II, pp. –.  A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge, ), p. .  Michael H. Whitworth, ‘Natural Science’, in Jason Harding (ed.), T. S. Eliot in Context (Cambridge, ), pp. –.  ‘Religion and Science: A Philosophical Essay. By John Theodore Merz’, International Journal of Ethics / (Oct. ), –.  ‘London Letter: July ’, Prose II, p. . First published in the Dial / (Aug. ), –.  ‘London Letter: September ’, Prose II, p. . First published in the Dial / (Oct. ), –.  ‘An Emotional Unity: A Review of Selected Letters, –, by Baron Friedrich von Hügel, ed. with a memoir by Bernard Holland’ (), Prose III, p. .  Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake, p. . Eddington’s Space, Time and Gravitation was reviewed in the Athenaeum: J. W. N. Sullivan, ‘The Unification of the World’, Athenaeum ( Jul. ), –.  Russell Kirk, Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century, nd edn (Wilmington, Del., ), p. .   May , Letters II, pp. –.  Marina Warner, ‘“Ourself behind Ourself, Concealed . . .”: Ethereal Whispers from the Dark Side’, in Tony Oursler, The Influence Machine (London, ).  Eddington, Nature of the Physical World, p. .  Simon Schaffer, ‘Let There Be Light’, Light Fantastic, episode  (London, ).  ‘The Social Function of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  ‘The Music of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  Marion Montgomery’s ‘Eliot and the Particle Physicist’, Southern Review (Jul. ), –, is a broad meditation on the parallel cultures of myth and theory within poetry and science.  Julie M. Johnson, ‘The Theory of Relativity in Modern Literature: An Overview and “The Sound and the Fury”’, Journal of Modern Literature /  (Jun. ), –.  Katy Price, ‘Flame Far Too Hot: William Empson’s Non-Euclidean Predicament’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews / (), .  Katy Price, Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe (Chicago, ).  Everdell, The First Moderns. See also Alan J. Friedman and Carol C. Donley, Einstein as Myth and Muse (Cambridge, ), p. .  Ian F. A. Bell, Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound (London, ), p. .  Ole Bay-Petersen, ‘T. S. Eliot and Einstein: The Fourth Dimension in the Four Quartets ’, English Studies / (), –.  Lawrence Durrell, A Key to Modern British Poetry (Norman, ), p. .

‘Vacant interstellar spaces’



 Katherine Ebury, Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights (Basingstoke, ), p. .  Katherine Ebury, ‘“In this valley of dying stars”: Eliot’s Cosmology’, Journal of Modern Literature / (spring ): –, , .  Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake, p. .  ‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’ (), Prose II, p. .  ‘Thoughts after Lambeth’ (), Prose IV, pp. –, .  In , Eddington described this principle as an instance of where ‘The coming theory of relativity had cast its shadow before’. Space, Time and Gravitation, p. .  William Thomson, ‘On the Age of the Sun’s Heat’, Macmillan’s Magazine  ( Mar. ), –; reprinted in William Thomson, Popular Lectures and Addresses, vol.  (London, ), p. .  Richard A. Proctor, Myths and Marvels of Astronomy (London, ), p. .  Beer, Open Fields, p. .  Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford, ), p. .  Beer, Open Fields, p. .  Edward Dowden, ‘The Scientific Movement and Literature’, in Studies in Literature – (London, ), p. .  Beer, Open Fields, pp. , .  Robert Macfarlane, ‘The Burning Question’, Guardian ( Sep. ), .  Beer, Open Fields, p. .  On William Empson’s poetic use of Eddington and Jeans’s cosmology, see Price, ‘Flame Far Too Hot’, –.  Virginia Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’, Criterion / (Jan. ), .  D. H. Lawrence, ‘Flowery Tuscany’, Criterion / (Dec. ), –. Lawrence contrasts this with ‘the instinctive feeling of the ordinary southerner’, that ‘the sun is so dominant that, if every phenomenal body disappeared out of the universe, nothing would remain but bright luminousness’.  W. R. Inge, ‘The New Götterdämmerung’, Philosophy / (), , , .  Ibid., , .  See Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, p. .  See Prose IV, n. , p. .  ‘A Commentary (Apr. )’, Prose II, pp. –. For a detailed account, see Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-war Britain (Oxford, ), pp. –.  Bonamy Dobrée, ‘The World of Dean Inge’, Criterion / (Jan. ), –.  William Empson, ‘Letter I’, The Complete Poems of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (London, ), p. .  Eddington, Stars and Atoms, p. .  Quoted Gardner, Composition of Four Quartets, p. .  Beer, Open Fields, p. .



Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

 Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake, p. . Sullivan also published interviews with prominent scientists in the Observer. See, for example, J. W. N. Sullivan, ‘Interviews with Great Scientists: I – Sir A. S. Eddington’, Observer ( Dec. ), .  J. W. N. Sullivan, ‘A Crucial Phenomenon’, Athenaeum ( May ), ; ‘On Relative Motion’, Athenaeum ( May ), ; ‘The Notion of Simultaneity’, Athenaeum ( May ), ; ‘The Union of Space and Time’, Athenaeum ( May ), ; and ‘The Equivalence Principle’, Athenaeum ( Jun. ), .  Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake, p. .  Frank Morley, ‘When and Where’, Criterion / (Jan. ), .  ‘Experiment in Criticism’ (Address Delivered at the City Literary Institute)’ (), Prose III, p. .  ‘The Genesis of Philosophic Prose: Bacon and Hooker’ (), Prose III, p. .  A. S. Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation (Cambridge, ), p. vi.  Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound and Music, ed. R. Murray Schafer (New York, ), p. .  J. W. N. Sullivan, ‘Dissolving Views’, Athenaeum ( Dec. ), –.  Albright, Quantum Poetics, p. .  Pound, Ezra Pound and Music, p. .  Inge, ‘The New Götterdämmerung’, .  ‘Thoughts after Lambeth’, Prose IV, p. .  ‘A Commentary (Apr. )’, Prose II, p. .  The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, p. .  Whitehead objected to Einstein’s concept of a variable space-time geometry on epistemological grounds, insisting that space-time must be uniform in structure: ‘The structure is uniform because of the necessity for knowledge that there be a system of inform relatedness . . . Otherwise, we can know nothing until we know everything.’ Alfred North Whitehead, The Principle of Relativity (Cambridge, ), p. . For a helpful discussion of Whitehead’s theory, see Jonathan Bain, ‘Whitehead’s Theory of Gravity’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics / (), –.  See Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge, ).  Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, , reprinted ), p. vii.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp. –.   Feb. , Letters III, p. .   Feb. , Letters III, pp. –.  Letters III, n. , p. .   Nov. , Letters V, p. .  See Eliot’s letter to Edmund Wilson,  Nov. , Letters III, p. . ‘The Return of Foxy Grandpa’, Prose III, pp. –.  ‘The Return of Foxy Grandpa’, Prose III, p. .

‘Vacant interstellar spaces’         

                       



Ibid., pp. , . Ibid., p. .  May , Letters IV, p. . Eliot planned for the pamphlet to be called Sentimental Physics:  Sep. , Letters IV, pp. –. ‘Thoughts after Lambeth’, Prose IV, pp. , . Ibid., pp. –. Eddington, Physical World, p. . Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake, p. . John MacMurray, ‘The Nature of the Physical World (A. S. Eddington)’, Criterion / (Jul. ), , . He adds: ‘In its attitude to the common complexion of current social thought it is curiously parallel to the position of a literary artist such as Mr. D. H. Lawrence’ (p. ). Montgomery Belgion, ‘New Pathways in Science (Eddington) and The World as I See It (Einstein)’, Criterion / (Jul. ), –. A. S. Eddington, New Pathways in Science (Cambridge, ), pp. , . ‘Thoughts after Lambeth’, Prose IV, p. . ‘Nature of Space: Professor Einstein’s Change of Mind’, The Times ( Feb. ), , quoted in ‘Thoughts after Lambeth’, Prose IV, p. . Charles Mauron, ‘On Reading Einstein’, Criterion / (Oct. ), , . ‘Religion and Science: A Phantom Dilemma’ (), Prose IV, pp. –. Harding, The Criterion, p. .  May , Letters III, p. . Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Letters IV, p. . ‘Poetry and Propaganda’ (), Prose IV, pp. –. First published in The Bookman (New York),  (Feb. ), –. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, pp. –. Ibid., p. . ‘Poetry and Propaganda’, Prose IV, p. . A. S. Eddington, ‘Gravitation and the Principle of Relativity [I]’, Nature / ( Mar. ), –; and A. S. Eddington, ‘Gravitation and the Principle of Relativity [II]’, Nature / ( Mar. ), –. Eddington, ‘Gravitation and the Principle of Relativity [I]’, . A. S. Eddington, The Expanding Universe (Cambridge, ), p. . Eddington provides an account of the eclipse expeditions in chapter  of Space, Time and Gravitation, pp. –. ‘Ben Jonson’ (), Prose II, p. . ‘Frame of reference’ is a technical term used by physicists to describe the position and/or velocity of the observer for any given measurement. See Eddington, Physical World, pp. –. ‘Ben Jonson’, Prose II, p. .

     



        

   

  

Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake, p. . Price, Loving Faster Than Light, p. .  May , Letters I, p. . ‘A Sceptical Patrician’, Prose II, pp. –. Eliot’s ‘depraved May’ in particular seems to be drawn from Henry Adams’s autobiography. See commentary on ‘Gerontion’ in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. : Collected and Uncollected Poems, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London, ), p. . Eliot wrote to John Rodker on  June  referring to a half-finished poem (glossed in the notes to the Letters as ‘Gerontion’), and then to Mary Hutchinson in early July enclosing a draft of the poem. Letters I, pp. –, . Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Notes for a Commentary on the Play’ (–), in Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare: A Selection, ed. R. A. Foakes (London, ), p. . Eddington, Physical World, p. . Quoted Richard Reeves, A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford (New York, ), p. . Eddington, Physical World, p. . Eddington, ‘Gravitation and the Principle of Relativity [II]’, . A. S. Eddington, Science and the Unseen World (London, ), p. . Eddington, ‘Gravitation and the Principle of Relativity [I]’, . ‘The New Theory of Sunspots: Professor Eddington’s Criticism’, The Times ( Dec. ), . Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Novels’, [unsigned] Times Literary Supplement ( Apr. ), . The larger passage reads: ‘The mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, composing in their sum what we might venture to call life itself; and to figure further as the semi-transparent envelope, or luminous halo, surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’ Letter to Paul Elmer More,  Feb. , quoted Harries, ‘The Rare Contact’, . Ibid. Albright, Quantum Poetics, p. . For further details on the notoriously poor air quality in St Louis at the turn of the century, see Andrew Hurley, ‘Busby’s Stink Boat and the Regulation of Nuisance Trades, –’, in Andrew Hurley (ed.), Common Fields: An Environmental History of St. Louis (St Louis, ), p. . ‘Mr P. E. More’s Essays, a Review of the Demon of the Absolute (New Shelburne Essays) by Paul Elmer More’, Times Literary Supplement( Feb. ), . Ibid. Eddington, Stars and Atoms, p. .

‘Vacant interstellar spaces’



 Eddington, Unseen World, p. .  ‘The Ballet’, Criterion / (Apr. ), –.  Anon., ‘A. S. Eddington: Stars and Atoms’, Criterion / (Dec. ), . The Criterion index gives no information as to author, nor is the review part of a batch.  Eddington, Unseen World, p. .  Eddington, Physical World, pp. , .  Jewel Spears Brooker, ‘The Structure of Eliot’s “Gerontion”: An Interpretation Based on Bradley’s Doctrine of the Systematic Nature of Truth’, ELH / (summer ), –.  Charles Bragdon, ‘New Concepts of Time and Space’, Dial  (Jan. ), .  J. A. Cramb, Reflections on the Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain (London, ), pp. –.  Beer, Open Fields, p. .  James Frazer, The Golden Bough (London, ), p. .  Ibid., p. .  Eddington, Physical World, pp. –.  J. W. N. Sullivan, ‘Interviews with Great Scientists: III – Sir James Jeans’, Observer ( Jan. ), .  Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (London, ). Compare The Family Reunion (CPP ): ‘Perhaps my life has only been a dream / Dreamt through me by the minds of others.’  Compare The Family Reunion: ‘We do not like the maze in the garden, because it too closely resembles the maze in the brain’ (CPP ).  Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation, p. .  ‘Preface’, in N. Gangulee, Thoughts for Meditation: A Way to Recovery from Within (London, ), p. .  See Eddington, Physical World, p. , quoting ‘The isle is full of noises . . .’.  Eddington, Unseen World, p. .  Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation, pp. –.  Eddington, Physical World, p. .  Charles Mauron, ‘On Reading Einstein’, .  ‘The Social Function of Poetry’, OPP, p. .

 

Looking Backwards

We see the light but see not whence it comes.

Light, of course, was not the sole province of the physicist. The sciences of psychology and optics provided an empirical corollary for alterations in colour vision that had enthralled Romantic painters as they gazed into the twilight. In Colour and Meaning () John Gage examines evolving notions of light and colour in the historical contexts of the last two centuries. Emerging from nineteenth-century attempts at categorisation – most notably in the colour systems of Goethe and Hering – ‘colour was an area of especial semantic richness at the beginning of this century’ when Eliot was formulating his theories of aesthetics and criticism. Illustrating the principle that ‘substantive theories become metaphors in another field’, conceptions of ‘light’ shifted back and forth between scientific and figurative contexts, as developments in anthropology and sociology of religion attempted to illuminate the most primitive forms of religion and ritual. Acknowledging this shift, Eliot wrote that Freud and Frazer were ‘throwing . . . light on the obscurities of the soul from a different angle’. Despite his scepticism at their methods, Eliot was deeply affected by Frazer, Durkheim, and Lévy-Brühl, writing, ‘The influence of Frazer on our generation cannot yet be accurately estimated; but it is comparable to that of Renan, and perhaps more enduring than that of Sigmund Freud.’ The cross-fertilisation of the formerly separate disciplines of classical studies, anthropology, and comparative religion by clinical psychology produced a shared methodology of comparative analysis of fragments, paralleled by Eliot’s mythical method. The unformed matter of the primitive mentality doubled in Eliot’s thinking as the ‘dark, psychic material’ whose appearance marked the beginning of the process of composition. The very phrase ‘dark psychic material’ obliquely echoes the scientific register: ‘dark matter’ is an astronomical term for ‘matter which has not been directly detected but whose existence is postulated to account for the 

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dynamical behaviour of galaxies or the universe’. In Eliot’s poetry, twilight becomes especially important as a liminal moment during which the hazed boundaries of light and shadow manifest the interstices in human awareness of the world. Eliot drew on the insights of the physicist, the sense psychologist, and the painter in order to render in poetry the luminary processes of creation beyond the naked eye, glimpsed in the ‘dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying’. While physics was calling into question the relation of sight to reality, the incipient science of cognition was uncovering the detailed neurological processes by which the brain converts visual sense data (percepts) into comprehensible information (concepts). Figures like Hermann von Helmholtz and William Wundt revived and refocused earlier questions about the distinctions between vision as information and vision as understanding (enshrined in the dual meanings of ‘I see’) and about the role of imagination in the creation of visual reality. These questions were complicated by the increasingly fluid material world posited by modern physics. Eddington draws a link between the physiological limitations of the eye and the widespread inability to imagine space-time in four dimensions, positing that ‘if we had had two eyes of different sizes, we might have evolved a faculty for combining the points of view of the mammoth and the microbe.’ Positioned at the contested boundary between inner and outer worlds, the human eye, its derivation, mechanisms, and limitations had been the focus for debates between idealism and materialism, empiricism and rationalism for four centuries. Eliot’s poetry often has recourse to a world of orbs, ‘balls’, and ‘sockets’, exploiting what Marina Warner calls the ‘globular matrix’ of the floating world of the eye. In his poetry of the s–s, Eliot graphically explores the ‘visual rhyme – orb/world/eye’, in its relation to the unmade, liquid biosphere of the Darwinian primordial. In the early ‘Suite Clownesque’ (), the titular figure is ‘A jellyfish impertinent, / A jellyfish without repose’. This ‘impressive . . . sceptic’ with his ‘nose that interrogates the stars’ is ‘quite at home in the universe’, the ‘first born child of the absolute’ (P , ). The flat cephalopod stare of ‘the octopus . . . with which the poet struggles’ metaphorically expresses an artistic struggle between fruitful self-encounter and the paralysis of solipsism. Eliot touched on this dynamic in his  introduction to Valéry’s The Art of Poetry, writing that ‘the one object of [the poet’s] curiosity was – himself. He . . . partakes of the attraction and the mystery of Narcissus, the aloofness and frigidity of that spiritual celibate.’ In the later poetry, the pairing of visual perception and knowledge becomes subsumed in a larger

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Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

project to understand the pattern of interactions between inner and outer awareness that gives rise to the alchemy of poetic creation. Although Eliot was not deeply versed in the details of cognitive psychology, the existence of its discoveries and developments on the margins of his cultural awareness functioned to facilitate his poetic use of shadows and twilight, without fear of falling into a neo-Romantic rapture. The imaginative and physiological ambiguities of sight allowed Eliot to enter his own, long awaited, ‘violet hour’. The nature and workings of the eye were fundamental to two of the most important moments in the history of science: Cartesian rationalism and Darwinian evolutionism. René Descartes ‘had made vision central to his natural philosophy’ and equated seeing with knowing. Dioptrics (), Descartes’s account of the physiology of vision, extends the analysis beyond the movement of light through space in order to give an (erroneous) explanation of how images move through the eye and into the brain. Christiaan Huygens developed his wave theory of light in refutation of Descartes’s theories. Two centuries later, in , Hermann von Helmholtz invented the ophthalmoscope, a device that allowed interior examination of the living human eye. Helmholtz constructed a pioneering physiology of the senses, focussed on motion perception, colour, and spatial vision, and understood through an empiricist mathematics of the eye (although his scientific investigations also extended to the physics of musical perception). Helmholtz’s monumental Handbook of Physiological Optics () set out an empiricist theory of vision that was widely disseminated in the second half of the nineteenth century. Understanding eye evolution was a central problem for Darwin’s theory of evolution. The Origin of Species () acknowledges the complexity of the eye as one of the greatest difficulties with the theory of natural selection, describing the retrospective mapping of ‘numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple’ as ‘insuperable by our imagination’. Despite this, Darwin argued passionately for a single origin but was unable to prove his hypothesis. Unlike other organs, which were thought to have developed in parallel across myriad species (leaving a reassuringly incalculable distance between amoeba and man), the eye’s monophyletic origin as posited by Darwin placed humanity’s organ of vision within the hereditary compass of the anthracite stare beneath the ‘ragged claws’ that beckon Prufrock. Eyes are thus an apt symbol of Enlightenment progress, as well as of its limitations. Eliot was the product of a culture still assimilating Darwinism in its scholarship and popular imagination. During Eliot’s Harvard years,

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anthropologists were expounding the view that ‘primitive man was at one end of the scale, modern western man at the other’ and displaying ‘a fascination with connecting the two’. Crawford has comprehensively detailed the outpouring of work in Eliot’s intellectual milieu concerning ‘the study of origins’ in biology, genetics, anthropology, comparative religion, and philosophy that in  attended the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Darwin’s greatest work, concluding that ‘Eliot was well aware of interests in evolutionary theory’. Eliot was reading widely in the study of heredity through to , when he considered ‘the theorists of biological adaptation: Lamarck, Darwin, Weismann, De Vries, Mendel’. He was wary of evolution insofar as he thought it entailed a determinist complacency, as his jibe in ‘Sweeney Erect’ () shows: The lengthened shadow of a man Is history, said Emerson Who had not seen the silhouette Of Sweeney straddled in the sun.

Eliot’s  prose work ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex’ combines Conradian exoticism (in the ‘tropical South London verdure . . . the tepid air swarmed with flies’) and Darwinian terms of art (‘progression’, ‘decline’, and ‘degeneration’) with revealing references to the science of sight. The topic is introduced dismissively (‘Bergson . . . writes very entertainingly on the structure of the eye of the frog’), but the passage moves quickly to consider whether vision is ‘founded on imagination, not on feeling’. The amphibious ancestry of the eye (gestured towards in the figure of the frog) is linked to the almost Lovecraftian motif of a spawning invertebrate devolution as if, as Albright suggests, beneath the anthropoid armour the human creature ‘is soft and deliquescent, a delirium of theriomorphs’. Crabs, octopi, oysters, lobsters, whelks, prawn, squid, jellyfish, sea anemones; a congeries of protozoa teem in Eliot’s writing. In his early forays into metaphysics, gelatinous zooplankton repeatedly provide a model of alien animal consciousness resistant to human claims to truth. Their deadened eyes gaze eerily out of the deep past, mocking the efforts of scientists to find patterns of progressive enlightenment in human history. ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ () opens with an adjective, marooned without a subject: Polyphiloprogenitive The sapient sutlers of the Lord



Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space Drift across the window-panes. In the beginning was the Word. ... Superfetation of τὸ ἔν, And at the mensual turn of time Produced enervate Origen.

(P )

The one-word line plunges the reader into a world of suspended abstraction, whose denizens are revealed to ‘drift’ like jellyfish or plankton, ‘through the water pale and thin’ (although the fastidious noun ‘sutler’ – a civilian quartermaster or providore – suggests that other archetypal scuttler, the crab). The Word appears as a religious confusion, part Gospel, part poetic birth-pang, a ‘superfetation’ (conception during pregnancy) that disrupts the natural rhythm of creation and crowds foetuses together in jumbled simultaneity. This unfinished, inchoate spawning produces ‘Origen’, his name a homophone for the origin (‘One’ and ‘Word’), who appears enervated and devitalised by misplaced overfecundating exertions. The poem is a closed loop of dangerous solipsism, concluding with the self-denuding Sweeney agitating the waters of his bath. The empirical linkage between ‘enlightened’ human and ‘base’ animal vision helps to explain Eliot’s emphasis on the physicality of the eyeball as a synecdoche for ‘lower’ or more ‘primitive’ humanity. Orbs of jelly afloat in the primeval waves, these images contain echoes of nineteenth-century experiments dissecting the retinas of frogs by candlelight, and betray anxieties as to the recently revealed kinship between humanity and the lowest forms of life. Disturbingly, fears of human degeneracy are frequently embodied in Eliot’s poetry in ‘the Jew’ (‘spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp’). This optical and tentacular bundle erupts disquietingly in ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ (), where Bleistein’s ‘lustreless protrusive eye’ stares from the ‘protozoic slime’ of Venice in decay (P ). The poem implicates ‘the Jew’ in a perceived social degeneration (‘The rats are underneath the piles. / The Jew is underneath the lot’) (P ), while its equation of passive amphibious imbecility with Jewishness reveals the latent hysteria of Social Darwinism. The deeply unpleasant ‘Dirge’ (c. ) features a relatedly grotesque reimagining of the sea-change motif, as the recurrent Bleistein is decomposed into an undersea ooze:

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Full fathom five your Bleistein lies Under the flatfish and the squids. Graves’ Disease in a dead jew’s eyes! When the crabs have eat the lids. Lower than the wharf rats dive Though he suffer a sea-change Still expensive rich and strange . . . (P )

Bleistein’s eyes, bereft of their lids and protruding from his ruined skull, cannot but fix an eidetic gaze on the site of their own dissolution and reconstitution in the form of eels, crabs, and, finally, pearls. Despite its prurient excitement at Bleistein’s submarine decomposition, ‘Dirge’ retains a meaningfully literary complexion, beyond its despoliation of Ariel’s song. The beseeching voice at its conclusion borrows from Brabantio’s description of Desdemona in Othello (‘. . . of spirit / So still and quiet . . .’) (I.iii.–), but speaks directly to both the assailed corpse and the reader, bringing reader, poet, and human wreckage into a complex fraternal complicity: Those are pearls that were his eyes. See! And the crab clambers through his stomach, the eel grows big And the torn algae drift above him, [purple, red,] And the sea colander. Still and quiet brother are you still and quiet . . .

There is something germinative in this ‘still and quiet’, conveying a double sense of essence motionless and abiding. The process of disintegration is gentler and more textual than other analogous moments in Eliot’s work. Whereas the women of Canterbury (in Murder in the Cathedral, ) find themselves subject to a sickening spawning of marine life in their innards, and in The Cocktail Party () Celia is famously atomised by ants, Bleistein ‘unfolds’ like ‘lace’, his vegetative renaissance more of a piece with the sprouting corpse of The Waste Land (and with Eliot’s  admission to Conrad Aiken that ‘it’s interesting to cut yourself to pieces once in a while, and wait to see if the fragments will sprout’). The ‘torn algae’ and the ‘sea colander’ contribute to the sense that Bleistein’s self-observed reversion to the autotrophic state of seaweed is a necessary and perhaps even creative return to source. This sense is supported by the final line’s other echo, of Pound’s sudden injunction near the end of Canto I – ‘Lie quiet Divus’ – a similarly disarming moment of compositional transparency and self-awareness of literary antecedent.

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Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

The imagery of eyes and undersea transformation also brings ‘Dirge’ into relation with some of Eliot’s critical comments on Donne’s sermons. Eliot elevates Donne above Andrewes and Latimer, Hooker, Hakluyt, and Raleigh due to his ‘introspective faculty’ imbuing his prose with ‘the sense of the artist as an Eye curiously, patiently watching himself as a man.’ But as in ‘Dirge’, Donne’s self-analytical ‘Eye’ does not merely observe the man, but bears detached witness to a process of submarine dissolution and change. It is revealing that, in illustrating Donne’s distinction Eliot chose to quote from Donne’s Mundus Mare, a sermon situated in the same oceanic flux as Eliot’s sea-changes: ‘The world is a sea, has ebbs and flows, storms and tempests, the greater fish devour the less; it is like the sea, no place of habitation, but a passage to our habitations.’ After quoting this passage, Eliot describes the way it effects a new emotional tone, ‘by repetition of phrase like wave upon wave’, relating this to ‘the method of the Fire-Sermon preached by the Buddha’. With characteristic insight, Helen Gardner calls Eliot’s ‘sea-image’ a symbol of ‘the journey of the alone to the alone’. In the tidal murmur of Eliot’s ‘Still and quiet brother are you still and quiet’, one hears a surrender of the self to the sea, and the beginning of a journey to our deepest habitations. By the time Eliot came to write Ash-Wednesday and, later, the Quartets, his metaphorical expression of the tropes of evolution and adaptation had themselves undergone a change. Gone is the desire for reversion to a primitive, liquid state, expressed sensually in ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ and wearily in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Absent too, the cultivated cruelty and revulsion of the sophisticate faced with the ‘protozoic eye’. But the poetry retains vestiges of the detached and scattered consciousness, the ‘I who am here dissembled’, which, like Donne, can gaze dispassionately at ‘the strings of my eyes’. In ‘The Dry Salvages’, the convergence of animal past and human present established in ‘Burnt Norton’ (‘all time is eternally present’) is viewed with detachment: It seems, as one becomes older, That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence – Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past. (P )

As Gardner catalogues, in the drafts of ‘The Dry Salvages’ ‘evolution’ was originally written as ‘Evolution’, while ‘development’ was surrounded by inverted commas, suggesting specific, rather than general, scepticism.



Looking Backwards

The disavowal of historical ‘development’ holds echoes of longing for a state of prelapsarian bliss, but is no longer infected with a reactionary horror of the present as time’s ruins. Instead, there is now only: The backward look behind the assurance Of recorded history, the backward half-look Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

(P )

Where for the speaker in ‘Burbank’ there was suppressed hysteria at the leprous extrusion of the primitive past – a terror of the primitive – here there is rather the ‘primitive terror’. The exquisitely ambiguous phrase embraces recognition of and compassion for the now-distant primogenitor facing the unformed darkness of ‘fur, flesh and faeces’ with uncomprehending fear. The gelatinous physicality of the eye is superseded in the later poetry by luminary metaphors of sight as revelation and understanding. The final section of ‘Choruses to The Rock’ addresses itself to the ‘Light . . . who hast moved us to building, to finding, to forming / at the ends of our fingers and beams of our eyes’ (P ). As the following sections make clear, however, even the outward figures encountered in the vision may ultimately reveal themselves to be projections of inner shadows. In the late eighteenth century, Charles Darwin’s father, Robert Waring Darwin, investigated the optical phenomenon of negative after-images (negative in that the colours are inverted). The negative after-image is a physiological doppelgänger, a projection of an image retained by the eye after exposure to the original has ceased. Robert Darwin’s report of his experiments (to the Royal Society, in March ) describes the colours produced in the mind as ‘the most beautiful circles of colours that imagination can conceive, which are most resembled by the colours occasioned by pouring a drop or two of oil on a still lake in a bright day . . . perpetually changing as long as they exist.’ He advocates a shift away from a purely mechanical conception of vision (as the pressure exerted by light on an inert retina), arguing that such a static, passive idea of the retina cannot explain the ‘evanescence . . . perpetual changes of . . . colours . . . nor the flash of light or colours’ experienced in the perception of after-images: ‘it is not absurd to conceive, that the retina may be stimulated into motion’. Darwin Sr’s experiments situate the eye at the nexus between external light and subjective vision, where physiological manipulation of the ocular nerves can create distortions in vision perception. The experiments are

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Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

thus a strange amalgam of immersive sensory experience and detached empirical self-observation. Robert Darwin knew that the ghostly colours were due to retinal fatigue, but couldn’t help describing them in a rapturous language of ‘evanescence’. As in Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, where: . . . the blind eye creates The empty forms between the ivory gates And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth . . . (P )

the eye, like the olfactory memory with its vivid limbic evocations, is a capricious messenger. Darwin Sr was aware of the parallels between his investigations of the eye’s active participation in image production, and the less well-reputed innovations of galanty men like Étienne-Gaspard Robert, whose magic lantern shows improved on the camera obscura to project a smoke-shadowed phantasmagoria for terrified assemblies of credulous Parisians. Darwin Sr draws a direct analogy between eyes struggling to adjust to light after sustained darkness and visual hallucinations of ‘numerous devils’, suggesting that in the latter case ‘so much were the spectra of their weakened eyes magnified by fear, and made subservient to the purposes of fraud or superstition.’ In ‘Dante’, Eliot describes how a first reading of the Inferno gives ‘a succession of phantasmagoric but clear images’, in ‘a continuous phantasmagoria’, whereas Joyce’s Ulysses evinces ‘a turning from the visible world to draw rather on the resources of phantasmagoria’. (He found in Baudelaire the ‘possibility of fusion between the sordidly realistic and the phantasmagoric’.) ‘Gerontion’ incorporates images of infinite, self-distorting visual replication in its ‘wilderness of mirrors’. The image of the distorting mirror had widespread currency during the explosion of popular expositions of Einsteinian physics: at least two popularisers ‘compared non-Euclidean geometry to a distorting fairground mirror’, while Eddington used a catalogue of visually distorting media (doorknobs, magic mirrors) to convey a sense of the contractions and expansions of the universe. In a contemporary review, Harriet Monroe described The Waste Land as ‘kaleidoscopic, profuse, a rattle and rain of colors . . . [a] wild dance in an ash-heap before a clouded and distorted mirror’. Robert Darwin also drew on the work of Bishop George Berkeley, whose Essay towards a New Theory of Vision () discussed the limitations of vision and advanced the theory that the proper objects of sight are not material objects at all, but the play and patterns of light and colour. Berkeley held that ‘reality lies not in the object itself, but in what you

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actually see.’ Berkeley’s elevation of the observer as determinant of the phenomenon observed makes him, in an extremely loose sense, a philosophical precursor to the relativistic universe of modern physics. Eddington follows Berkeley’s line of thought in his suggestion that the ‘mind’s search for permanence has created the world of physics’, and imagines the discoveries of modern physics as a form of metaphysical self-encounter: We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And Lo! It is our own.

In Eddington’s formulation, reality is determined by a prismatic process of mental selection: ‘Mind filters out matter from the meaningless jumble of qualities, as the prism filters out the colours of the rainbow from the chaotic pulsations of white light.’ Berkeley ‘pointed to the way in which such phenomena of light as the rainbow could be used as a scientific model for the imagination as a perceptual relationship between man and nature.’ It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Berkeley was rediscovered by the Romantics: Coleridge considered himself a ‘Berkeleyan’, and referred to Shakespeare’s ‘prismatic imagination’. In Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ () thought ‘gleams’, like light ‘half-extinguish’d’. The poem conflates physiological vision with an encompassing, transcendent form of perception: the ‘eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy’ may ‘see into the life of things.’ In Wordsworth’s Berkeleyan formulation of sight, ‘the language of the sense’, ‘the mighty world / Of eye and ear’ is formed from a composite of ‘both what they half-create/And what perceive’. But it was Coleridge’s peculiarly embodied Berkeleyan vision that seeded in the poetic and literary imaginations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In his subtle poetic account of the mind’s awareness of its own deceptions, ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’ (), Coleridge writes: And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when The woodman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist’ning haze, Sees full before him, gliding without tread, An image with a glory round its head; The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues, Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues!

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Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

The ‘image with a glory round its head’ recalls the ‘Brocken spectre’ that Coleridge had hoped to encounter during a walking tour of the Harz Mountains in Germany, in May . The Spectre of the Brocken is an optical illusion occurring in places of high elevation when the sun is low in the sky (typically at dawn or dusk, in autumn and winter), in which the observer’s shadow is hugely magnified and cast onto the surface of cloud or fog banks. The giant figure’s head is seen surrounded by a glittering corona of colours (a solar ‘glory’). Despite his failure to see the ‘Spirit of the Mountain’, Coleridge’s notebooks record a number of eyewitness accounts. Coleridge made his pilgrimage to the Brocken in obeisance to his poet’s intuition that the prismatic half-shadow represented an encounter with his own ‘shaping spirit of imagination’. (In  he wrote that the secondary imagination ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create’.) In his Shakespearean lectures, the Spectre symbolises those elements of the self that might be glimpsed, unrecognised yet familiar, in the subtle textures of Shakespeare’s drama, an unwitting literary mirror-play: The reader often feels that some ideal trait of our own is caught, or some nerve has been touched by the vibration that we feel, a sort of thrilling, which tells us that we know ourselves the better for it. In the plays . . . every man sees himself without knowing that he sees himself, as in the phenomena of nature, in the mist of the mountain, a traveller beholds his own figure, but the glory round the head distinguishes it from a mere vulgar copy; or as a man traversing the Brocken in the north of Germany at sunrise . . . sees before him a figure of gigantic proportions . . . he only knows it to be himself by the similarity of action.

Even as he acknowledges the numinous, attenuated existence of his thought ‘that liv’st but in the brain’, Coleridge succumbs to its enthralling effect (‘though well I see, / She is not thou, and only thou are she, / Still, still . . .’). Stephen Prickett calls this ‘a kind of experience where perception is in a peculiarly literal sense an act of creation,’ a ‘shadow of our own casting’. The Brocken Spectre was assimilated by numerous nineteenth-century poets. It appears in De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis () and forms a key element in the climax of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (), where the protagonist, like Eliot’s hollow men, is ‘confounded between the shadow and the substance’. Gerard Manley Hopkins teases out this involuted dynamic, replacing the Romantic language of the supernatural with a modern wonder at the unseen spaces in the vision:

Looking Backwards



It was a hard thing to undo this knot. The rainbow shines, but only in the thought Of him that looks. Yet not in that alone, For who makes rainbows by invention? And many standing round a waterfall See one bow each, yet not the same to all. But each a hand’s breadth further than the next. The sun on falling waters writes the text Which yet is in the eye or in the thought. It was a hard thing to undo this knot.

Hopkins was fascinated by the mysterious metaphysical action that underlies the movement of the universe: ‘The laps of running foam striking the sea-wall double on themselves and return . . . This is mechanical reflection and is the same as optical: indeed all nature is mechanical, but then it is not seen that mechanics contain that which is beyond mechanics.’ In  Eliot warned of the need to avoid ‘excessive reliance’ on a ‘causal’ (or mechanistic) explanation of poetry. Speaking of the prevalent ‘attempt to understand a poem by explaining its origins’, Eliot referred to Jung’s concept of ‘psychic energy’ as a ‘suggestive analogy’. Jung’s distinction between the ‘mechanistic’ and ‘energic’ explanations of phenomena draws on the nineteenth-century theory of psychodynamics mutually developed out of physics and physiology by Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke and Hermann von Helmholtz. The causal view is limited to the interaction of ‘scraps’ that become ‘transmuted into great poetry’, whereas the energic view is a consciousness of the dynamic patterns of energy, ‘something which must remain unaccountable . . . something new . . . something that cannot be wholly explained by anything that went before.’ Slipping into the Aristotelian idiom of his former student self, Eliot embraces the mystery of final causes over the mechanistic disassemblies of modern criticism, accepting the productive tension between rational awareness and the spectres thrown into vision by the mind’s eye. The exegesis of a poem by investigation of its sources is a harsh ‘light’ that breaks the contact between poem and reader and obscures ‘the radiance shed by the poems themselves.’ In The Waste Land, a softly dangerous hieratic voice promises a shadowsubstance ‘different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you’ (P ). The pervasive ‘fog of a winter dawn’ replicates the meteorological conditions of the ‘wintry dawn’ in which Coleridge’s rustic encounters the unknown, because unlooked for, Spectre. The passage by the dry pool in ‘Burnt



Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

Norton’ is replete with motifs of self-conscious visual revelation and concealment. In ‘our first world’ the spirits are ‘invisible’, insubstantial yet described in quasi-scientific terms (‘moving without pressure’, ‘through the vibrant air’). The passage incorporates modern understandings of the physiology of sight: the ‘unseen eyebeam’ intervenes between the apprehension of the roses and the flowers themselves. The speaker’s consciousness of the nerve impulses passing along the strings of the eyes (starkly depicted in Ash-Wednesday) adulterates the experience: the poem’s selfconsciousness is transferred to the roses, which ‘had the look of flowers that are looked at’. The poem evinces an appreciation of the scientific bases of subjective spiritual experience. The ‘dry concrete’, ‘brown edged’ pool is transformed into a mystical vision by the optical illusion of ‘water out of sunlight’: a mirage created by the refraction of light on the hot dryness of the pool-bed (P –). Notes  ‘Choruses from The Rock’, P .  John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London, ), p. .  Beer, Open Fields, p. .  ‘A Prediction in Regard to Three English Authors, Writers Who, Though Masters of Thought, Are Likewise Masters of Art’, Prose II, p. .  ‘A Commentary (Apr. )’, Prose II, p. .  ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  OED. The term was in circulation at least by , when it appeared in the Astrophysical Journal , .  Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation, p. .  ‘Whispers of Immortality’, P .  Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Oxford, ), p. .  Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, p. .  The Nobel Laureate biologist Sir Charles Sherrington described the incipient eye as ‘a bud . . . feeding itself on juices from its mother . . . the whole structure, with its prescience and . . . efficiency, is produced by and out of specks of granular slime arranging themselves as of their own accord’. Charles Sherrington, Man on His Nature (Cambridge, ), pp. –.  ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  ‘Introduction’, The Art of Poetry, p. xxiii. Compare The Family Reunion: ‘I was only the feet, and the eye / Seeing the feet: the unwinking eye’ (CPP ).  Patricia Fara, ‘Cartesian Visions’, Endeavour / (), .  See David Park, The Fire within the Eye: A Historical Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Light (Princeton, ), pp. –.

Looking Backwards



 See Myles W. Jackson, Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instruments in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, ).  First translated into English in –.  Darwin, Origin of Species, pp. –.  Genetic research has isolated the Pax- gene, ‘the same underlying genetic basis in the eye of all animal species’. A version of the prototypal eye postulated (but never discovered) by Darwin has been found in ‘a flatworm in a mountain lake of Hokkaido’: Elisabeth Schmid, ‘Eyeing a Common Origin (Where Even Darwin Didn’t Manage to Tread)’,  Jun. , Youris.com.  Crawford, Savage and the City, pp. , , .  ‘Contemporanea’, , quoted in Crawford, Savage and the City, p. .  ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex [I]’, The Little Review / (May ), –; and ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex [II]’, The Little Review / (Sep. ). –.  Albright, Quantum Poetics, p. .  Discussing his own theory of value (in the context of his Christian faith) with Geoffrey Faber in , Eliot enjoins Faber to ‘remember [Plato’s] oyster’ (Plato, Philebus, C: ‘If you had no memory you could not even remember that you ever did enjoy pleasure . . . your life would not be that of a man, but of a mollusc or other shell-fish like the oyster’).  Sep. , Letters III, p. . For a further catalogue, see Albright, Quantum Poetics, pp. –, .  The sea anemone is present in Eliot’s  dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the Work of F. H. Bradley: ‘The sea-anemone which accepts or rejects a proffered morsel is thereby relating an idea to the sea-anemone’s world.’ For this and other instances, see the commentary in Ricks and McCue (eds.), The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. , p. .  ‘the One’.  Compare the similarly contrived, polysyllabic degeneration in Harry’s extraordinary pronouncement ‘the dead stone is seen to be batrachian, / The aphyllous branch ophidian’. The Family Reunion (CPP ).  ‘Gerontion’, P .  Compare Iachimo’s description of ‘an eye / Base and illustrious as the smoky light / That’s fed with stinking tallow’ (Cymbeline, I.vi.–).  Ricks rightly calls ‘Dirge’ ‘the ugliest touch of anti-Semitism in Eliot’s poetry’: T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London, ), p. .  Letter to Conrad Aiken,  Sep. , Letters I, p. .  Canto I of the collected Cantos was originally published as part of Canto III (one of the ‘Ur-Cantos’) in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, Jul. . As such, it predates Eliot’s ‘Dirge’, written sometime in  (P ).  Pound interrupts his retelling of Odysseus’s descent into the underworld to silence a previous translator and re-teller of the story, Andreas Divus.  ‘The Preacher as Artist: A Review of Donne’s Sermons: Selected Passages, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith’ (), Prose II, pp. –.  Ibid., p. . Compare The Family Reunion: ‘the self which persisted only as an eye, seeing’ (CPP ).

                      

  

Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

‘The Preacher as Artist’, p. . Gardner, Composition of Four Quartets, p. . Ash-Wednesday, P . Gardner, Composition of Four Quartets, pp. –. Robert Waring Darwin, ‘New Experiments on the Ocular Spectra of Light and Colours’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London  (), . Darwin, ‘New Experiments’, . See Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, pp. –. Darwin, ‘New Experiments’, . ‘Dante’, Prose III, pp. , . ‘Milton I’, OPP, p. . ‘What Dante Means to Me’, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings, p. . Edwin Slosson, Easy Lessons in Einstein (London, ), p. ; and Charles Nordmann, Einstein and the Universe, trans. Joseph McCabe (London, ), p. . See Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake, p. . Eddington, ‘Gravitation and the Principle of Relativity [I]’, . Harriet Monroe, ‘A Contrast’, Poetry / (Mar. ), . Stephen Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (Cambridge, ), p. . Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation, pp. , . Ibid., p. . Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth, p. . Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge on Shakespeare: The Text of the Lectures of –, ed. R. A. Foakes, Lecture  (London, ), p. . William Wordsworth, ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, Lyrical Ballads (London, ), pp. –. Coleridge, ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’, Complete Poems, pp. –. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, eds. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen, vol.  (London, –), p. . Coleridge returns to the image of the Brocken Spectre as a simulacrum of artistic genius in Aids to Reflection (): ‘as many as are not delighted by it are disturbed, perplexed, irritated. The beholder either recognises it as a projected form of his own Being, that moves before him with a Glory round its head, or recoils from it as from a Spectre.’ Quoted in Coleridge, Complete Poems, p. . Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’, in Complete Poems, p. . The Brocken Spectre haunts this poem, too. Compare: ‘A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud’. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (; London, ), p. . Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures – On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, vol.  (London, ), p. . Eliot listed Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare among the suggested reading for his Oxford Extension Course. Schuchard, ‘T. S. Eliot as an Extension Lecturer’, .

Looking Backwards



 Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth, pp. , .  James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (London, ), p. .  Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘It was a hard thing to undo this knot’ (), in Christopher Ricks (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Oxford, ), p. .  Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphrey House and Graham Storey (London, ), p. . For more on Hopkins’s use of the language of physics, see Daniel Brown, Hopkins’ Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (Oxford, ).  ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, OPP, p. . Eliot had used the same phrase (‘suggestive analogy’) to refer to catalysis in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’.  ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, OPP, p. .  Ibid., pp. , .  Eddington’s expositions of modern physics provide instances of the continuing association of luminary phenomena with supernatural encounter. The physicist relates a hypothetical encounter with the ghost of a star, a spectral solar mass having ‘all the characteristics of a real sun so far as light and heat are concerned, only there would be no substantial body present.’ He goes on, more disquietingly, ‘Perhaps one or more of the many spiral nebulae are really phantoms of our own stellar system.’ Space, Time and Gravitation, pp. –.  Compare the ‘formal pattern’ to Sherrington’s description of visual sense data as ‘electrical patterning . . . in the brain’. Charles Sherrington, Man on His Nature, p. .

 

Luminous Recognitions

. . . quelques paroles, nettes et lumineuses: c’était tout.

Light operates directionally in Four Quartets, focusing attention on recurrent but transforming motifs, like sudden arcs of sunlight under water. In ‘Burnt Norton’, the glancing flash of sunlight on a bird’s wing answers ‘light to light, and is silent, the light is still’, ‘Sudden in a shaft of sunlight’ (P –). Such moments are the realisation of Dr. Vittoz’s theory of metaphysical simplification, imagined in a language of light: ‘quelques paroles, nettes et lumineuses: c’était tout’ – ‘a few words, sharp and bright: that was all’. (Vittoz’s former patient Henriette Lefebvre calls Vittoz ‘un être de lumière’ (‘a Being of Light’). Vittoz encouraged his patients to focus on words as mantras, which, with repetition and concentration, acquire a psychological luminescence. Amanda Harris argues that ‘in the sessions with Vittoz Eliot embraced an aspect of the Expressivist impulse that attributes a power to objects (in this case words) which is evident as luminosity’. While it seems clear that Eliot made poetic use of words in this manner, this predates his contact with Dr. Vittoz. Harris notes two statements ‘linking luminosity and literary perception in Eliot’s oeuvre’. The first is Eliot’s description in  of ideas standing forth ‘luminous with an independent life of their own’ (although Harris misdates this to  and therefore attributes it to Vittoz’s influence). The second is Eliot’s  description of the ‘almost overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling’ that characterised his first experience of Romantic poetry in FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: ‘It was like a sudden conversion; the world appeared anew, painted with bright, delicious, and painful colours’ (UP ). Eliot’s vivid description intermingles religious experience, aestheticism, physiology, and something akin to a proto-psychology of colour. It reflects the tapestry of scientific, literary, artistic, and psychological thinking about light and colour, which gained momentum in the eighteenth century. 

Luminous Recognitions



Newton’s  analysis of the visible spectrum of light and colour diverted scientific energy away from experiments in spatial vision and towards the investigation of colour phenomena, more traditionally the province of theology and art. Goethe stands at the polymathic cross-ways between these intellectual pursuits. He had struggled to reconcile his intuitive sense of the purity of white light with Newton’s finding that white light is made up of the spectrum of colour. In Theory of Colours () Goethe privileged the eye’s perception and subordinated scientific analysis of colour to Romanticism’s emphasis on felt experience. Of course, the linkage between observable optical effects and spiritual experience was not an invention of the eighteenth century. Dante equates sun-blindness with the momentary annihilation of revelation: ‘And that condition which we often see / In eyes but lately smitten by the sun / For a short time thereafter blinded me.’ Gage notes Dante’s anticipation of ‘Newton’s isolation of seven spectral colours’ in the Purgatorio’s recognition scene between Beatrice and Dante: [I] saw the flames advance, leaving the air Behind them as it had been painted on; ... Whose seven great bands of colour lodged and shone, Till the sky stood with all those hues engrossed That streak the Sun’s bright bow and Delia’s zone.

Eliot is responsive to the peculiarly luminary quality of Dante’s style: ‘The thought may be obscure, but the word is lucid, or rather translucent.’ During an evening walk in , the physiologist Jan Evangelista Purkinje noticed chromatic changes in the dusk landscape. Reds faded in intensity and blues and violets became correspondingly acute. He discovered that the photoreceptive cells in the human eye are divided between those that function in daylight (cone cells) and those that operate in the dark (rod cells). Cone cells cluster in the centre of the retina, capturing the intense sharpness of sunlit images, and are largely responsible for colour. Rod cells are concentrated around the periphery of the retina and are used in peripheral vision. They are more sensitive to light than cone cells, but less sensitive to colour. The predominance of rod cells in mesopic (twilight) vision is responsible for the phenomenon now known as the Purkinje shift, which occurs at the point of transition between day and night vision, when the expansive richness of blue and indigo predominates. Purkinje’s publications on vision perception ‘sought to relate subjective phenomena to their objective underpinnings – to link psychology to



Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

physiology’ and in doing so contributed to the emergence of the science of experimental psychology. Like Robert Darwin before him, some of Purkinje’s earliest experiments involved placing pressure on the eyeball to create patterns in the vision. He, too, was fascinated by the dynamic nature of vision. There is no evidence that Eliot ever read Purkinje’s theories (although The Family Reunion makes reference to the fact that ‘the eye adjusts itself to a twilight’) (CPP ), but he was well versed in the closely related scholarship of another psychologist and physiologist, Wilhelm Wundt. In  Eliot confidently referred to Wundt as one of the ‘half-dozen or so of the founders of modern psychology’. Building on the work done on sensory physiology by his teacher, Hermann von Helmholtz, Wundt carried out psychological research in the form of experiments into ‘internal perception’, the nature of religious belief and consciousness, and the experience of vision and colour. Principles of Physiological Psychology () delved into the most primitive and subjective emotional experiences of the human mind and attempted by objective observation to find an empirical schema. At the turn of the century Wundt was still conducting similar experiments on colour perception, attempting to demonstrate a standardised experience of colour across a group of test subjects. Wundt and Purkinje are relevant to the study of Eliot’s poetics because, like Eliot, their thought draws on the subjectivism of Romanticism but attempts to find an objective pattern. Their related methods and preoccupations percolated through the Harvard philosophy department at the time when Eliot was a student there. Eliot was taught by a number of Wundt’s former pupils, including Josiah Royce (a student of Wundt’s in –). In – Eliot took Philosophy , ‘an elementary laboratory course in experimental psychology under Herbert Sidney Langfeld’. The following year he undertook a psychology seminar on ‘Mind and Body’, Philosophy b, taught by Hugo Münsterberg, an experimental psychologist and former pupil of Wundt’s. Eliot’s surviving lecture notes reveal a study of ‘the physiology of organs of skin’ in producing sensation and temperature awareness, a subject in which Purkinje was also greatly interested, as well as case studies of pathological experiences of mystical phenomena. Reviewing Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie in , Eliot lamented what he saw as Wundt’s failure to enlarge his contributions to ‘the study of the primitive mind’ with a ‘“psychological” account of the development of man’ focused on ‘individual psychology’ and ‘psychoanalysis’. Eliot referred to Wundt again in  as a pioneer of social psychology. Purkinje had read Goethe’s theories on colour as a medical

Luminous Recognitions



student, and was later to receive social patronage from the poet. His studies of visual phenomena proceeded from an acceptance of the ‘subjective dimension of all vision’, as argued by Goethe, but ‘sought to determine the objective correlates of the subjective impressions . . . relating aspects of our experience to their underlying physiological foundations’. Eliot’s early essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is the transmutation of this same project into the realm of artistic experience by a writer long interested in the relationship between knowledge and experience. This pairing of visual impression and knowledge persisted into the era of Eliot’s later poetry and the composition of Four Quartets. An unpublished  letter Eliot wrote to Montgomery Belgion draws an analogy between the experience of studying philosophy and the practice of poetry, using language drawn from the physiology of vision to describe: a kind of awareness of subtilties [sic] and refinements and qualifications hovering in the corner of my eye, which I could never quite focus: accompanied by the suspicion that if I could focus them, there would be a further area of qualification again, flickering on the periphery. A sort of infinite regress . . . I have, of course, always recognised a similar unexplored and only partly explorable area in poetry, which is perhaps what interests me most in the practice of poetry.

In The Family Reunion, Harry refers to his frustrated awareness of the Furies ‘wherever I am not looking, / Always flickering at the corner of my eye’ (CPP ). Experiments in the physiology of light and colour perception spanned the years of Eliot’s poetic productivity. In  Selig Hecht demonstrated that a rod cell will respond to as little light as a single photon. The later visions of light portrayed by Eliot are formed by an unstable consolidation of natural phenomena (the environment) and psychological reverberation (the mind), as mediated through the functional physiology of the eye (the body). As in his view of Wundt’s experimental psychology as necessarily entailing a history of the development of religious feeling, Eliot increasingly saw spiritual sight as a correlative of visual perception. The glittering vision in ‘Burnt Norton’ of the lotos rising ‘out of heart of light’ uncannily recalls Goethe’s description of a visual percept engendered by his reading of Purkinje’s Sight from a Subjective Standpoint (): When I closed my eyes . . . I could imagine a flower in the centre of my visual sense. Its original form never stayed for a moment: it unfolded, and from within it new flowers continuously developed with coloured petals or green leaves. These were not natural flowers; they were fantasy flowers, but as regular as rosettes carved by a sculptor.

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Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

Eliot rejected Goethe’s romantic attachment to subjective experience, but his poetic depiction of the moment of revelation in the garden would seem to owe something to Goethe’s transmutation of visual sense data into spiritual truth. The difference in vision is occasioned by Eliot’s willingness to situate the momentary encounter with the ‘heart of light’ in the fluid space between the eyebeam and the soul. In Eliot’s later poetry, the involutions of light and shadow reach a peak of intensity in the creative ambiguity of the violets, indigos, and blues of the ‘waning dusk’. That these twilight colours are themselves so affective and difficult to qualify accounts in part for their prevalence in Eliot’s work; hovering at the elusive edge of the visible spectrum, violet offers a glimpse of a different register of vision beyond the ordinary physiological reach of the human eye. There is a sense in which violet, of all colours, slips between the struts of scientific attempts at taxonomy. It is the chromatic equivalent of the ‘something which must remain unaccountable’ in Eliot’s account of poetic alchemy. In his address to the Royal Society on the minute detail of colour vision in , Darwin Sr lamented that ‘it is very difficult for different people to give the same names to various shades of colours’. Patrick Syme’s Nomenclature of Colours () – which accompanied the younger Darwin on the voyage of the Beagle – used the flowers of anemone, gentian, flax, and hyacinth as the ‘ideal’ standards for variant shades of blue. The captivation of the Romantic literary sensibility by colour, especially blue-violet, is exemplified by Novalis’s ‘Blaue Blume’ (blue flower), which came to symbolise a yearning towards the mystery of the infinite. The Romantic elision of the botanical and the spiritual in a single colour appears in Ash-Wednesday, only slightly transformed, as the ‘blue of larkspur, blue of Mary’s colour’ (P ). In the colour-soaked fourth section, blue-violet light has a near-mystical allure, as a Marian figure ‘veiled in white and blue’ wanders amid the twilight in a grove of yew. Her footsteps in this garden ‘between the violet and the violet’ are like the footsteps of Persephone, whose re-emergence from Hades presages the return of spring. Eliot’s ‘blessed sister’ and ‘holy mother’ in ‘blue of larkspur’ is given a compound allusive richness by the layering of Marian iconography over the pre-Christian Persephone, whose own passage from the shadow of the underworld ‘between blue rocks’ also ‘made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs’ (P –). Despite (or perhaps because of ) their willingness to inhabit closeted scenes of urban squalor, the French Symbolist poets whose work enthralled

Luminous Recognitions



the young Eliot had been alert to the suggestive and transformative powers of dusk and moonlight. Pierrot lunaire () by the Belgian Symbolist Albert Giraud (later translated into German and set to music in Schoenberg’s atonal  rendering) is typical in its celebration of the ‘rayon de lune fantasque’, which functions as an aid to inner vision (‘Pierrot Dandy’). The inverted luminescence of moonlight is the outward mirror of the altered truth of dream sight. In ‘Ivresse de Lune’ (‘Moondrunk’): ‘Le vin que l’on boit par les yeux / A flots verts de la Lune coule’ (‘The wine which through the eyes we drink / Flows nightly from the moon in torrents’). Stéphane Mallarmé, whose images provided Eliot with a model of symbolist introspection, combined the cool newness of twilight with the beating pulse of breath in Autre éventail (de Madame Mallarmé) (Another Fan): ‘Un fraîcheur de crepuscule / Te vient à chaque battement’ (‘A freshness of the twilight air / Is reaching you at every beat’). Twilight became a defining feature of the evocative proto-symbolist poetry of the ‘Celtic Twilight’ of Yeats, George Russell, and Lionel Johnson: ‘Even the urban, Francophile Arthur Symons was led by Yeats from London gaslight to twilight’. The Celtic movement of the s and s sought to escape the ‘ideal sunshine, that of Greece and Rome’ in which it saw English poetry as existing, and to turn instead to the ‘lowering skies . . . the mists and twilight of the northern latitude’. The fairytale elements of the Irish revival were antipathetic to Eliot and the Anglo-Modernism he helped engender. But the psychological liminality of twilight caused it to be adopted as a moment of intersection between the post-Romantic Irish folkloric aesthetic and the surrealist symbolism of nascent pan-European modernisms. Eliot’s emphasis on fading light was thus part of a broad contemporary tendency. Yet the literary association of the twilight hour with an immersion in the insights of the past wrought by memory and desire long predates these developments. In his annotations to The Waste Land, Lawrence Rainey associates Eliot’s passage evoking ‘the violet hour’ with Dante’s Purgatorio (Canto VIII, lines –): It was now the hour that turns back the desire Of sailors and melts their heart The day that they have bidden dear friends farewell, and pierces the new traveller with love if he hears in the distance the bell that seems to mourn the dying day.

Dante associates the hour with turning, as ‘when the eyes and back / Turn upward from the desk’ in The Waste Land. Interestingly, however, the



Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

‘violet hour’ in Eliot’s poem is evoked (via Dante) not through the fading light, but through the aural cue of the tolling bell. The luminary word-play concluding ‘Choruses from The Rock’ echoes with an elusive, almost Shakespearean music that is strangely out of place amidst the austerity of the Christian psycho-drama: The eastern light our spires touch at morning, The light that slants upon our western doors at evening, The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight, Moon light and star light, owl and moth light, Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade.

(P )

The passage effects a series of playful involutions of sound around a core of ‘light’, evoking the creatures of midsummer magic (owls, bats, and glowworms hover above stagnant pools and quiver ‘on a grassblade’) and interweaving the labial softness of ‘moonlight’, ‘moth light’, and ‘glowlight’ with the titillating toothsome sharpness of ‘batflight’. This is, at a glance, the idiom of Robin Goodfellow, of Titania’s love-speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (although that passage revels in an altogether different magic, the compound voluptuary sweetness of fruit, fly, and waxen thigh): Feed him with apricocks and dewberries, With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries; The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees, And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs And light them at the fiery glow-worm’s eyes, To have my love to bed and to arise; And pluck the wings from painted butterflies To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes: Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, III.i.–)

Eliot’s repeated use of ‘light’ as rhythmic exhalation amounts to poetic incantation or liturgy, in much the way Eliot discerned in Shakespeare’s Pericles, when he described the verse as ‘the speech of creatures who are more than human, or rather, seen in a light more than that of day . . . The scene becomes a ritual; the poetic drama developed to its highest point turns back towards liturgy’. The late poem ‘To Walter de la Mare’ () again combines a revenant-soaked twilight with an eldritch assortment of pseudo-Shakespearean creatures: When cats are maddened in the moonlight dance, Dogs cower, flitter bats, and owls range

(P )

Luminous Recognitions



Yet another antecedent hovers behind these passages. ‘Choruses from The Rock’ in particular looks back to the metaphysical poetry of Henry Vaughan in the precise shaping of its fluttering traceries of light and darkness. In the spring of  Eliot gave a series of six lectures on metaphysical poetry for the BBC, broadcast weekly. In the fourth of these, Eliot defends his placement of Vaughan within the metaphysical canon based on the particularities of his immersion in nature: It is not a general sense of what Whitehead would call ‘pattern’ in the life of nature, nor a love of nature for its own sake: I think it is a reference to some particular experience or experiences at some early period; just as I think that very different work, the ‘New Life’ of Dante, also refers to a particular experience of childhood.

Still brooding on the abstract patterning of Whitehead’s process-based cosmology, Eliot finds aesthetic and metaphysical power in the luminary particularities of experience underlying the visionary poetics of Dante and Vaughan. In a passage that bears quotation at length, Eliot characterises Vaughan’s love of nature in contradistinction to Wordsworthian ‘pantheism’ and the ‘warm fog’ of contemporary mysticism, by recourse to a creative grammar of light and darkness: One of the frequent characteristics of Christian mysticism has been a use of various imageries of light and darkness, sometimes indeed of a light which is at the same time darkness; such imagery is used by John of the Cross, perhaps the greatest psychologist of all European mystics; it is used by Meister Eckhart and the German mystics. I do not know whether it has been remarked how many of Vaughan’s images are light images. He certainly did not borrow these from Donne. And very often Vaughan’s are images of transient light: he is struck by the spark, the meteor, the glowworm and the firefly.

Eliot is alive to the transience of light-fall in Vaughan’s vision, and his own ‘Choruses’ may well consciously carry forward Vaughan’s vocabulary of fascination (‘Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade’). If so, there is a complex of embedded tensions and resonances between the acts of borrowing and transmission, and Eliot’s prizing both Dante and Vaughan for the individuality of their lived experience. Like some other aspects of Eliot’s poetic sensibility, the poet’s hyperawareness of the nuances of fading light is also reminiscent of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The novel’s employment of modes of mental shadowing prefigures and mirrors Eliot’s own. Heart of Darkness begins in a daylight world certain of its own enlightenment, the bloodless sky awash with

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Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

‘a benign immensity of unstained light’. Marlow begins his tale as the sun sets and ‘dusk fell on the stream’. There is a sense in this opening that the reaches of vision are contracting and turning inward as the narrative sinks downward into ‘the deepening night upon the sleepless river’, until it becomes ‘pitch dark’ and Marlow is reduced to one of the novel’s many discarnate voices. Four Quartets repeatedly effects a similarly gradual darkling of vision. In ‘The Dry Salvages’, the expansive aerial view of the river as a demarcation contracts within a few lines to encompass only those few things hazily perceived within the circle of gaslight on a winter’s evening – a more settled, introspective refiguring of the magic lantern that throws ‘the nerves in patterns on a screen’ in ‘Prufrock’. The parallel between the works lies not in any stark spiritual dichotomies of light and darkness, but in the interest both writers have in locating the psychological action of their work within a twilight space that exists in the temporary psychic threshold between day and night. As Marlow approaches the nadir of his riverboat journey, the steamer’s ‘outlines blurred . . . on the point of dissolving’ as ‘the dusk came gliding . . . like a state of trance’. The corporeal, the empirical and the mechanical dissolve in the oncoming haze. Reality is determined solely by the coercive and chaotic psychology of Mr Kurtz. This is the metaphysical error warned against in the first of the Heraclitean fragments that form the epigraph to ‘Burnt Norton’. Grover Smith renders it ‘Although there is but one Centre, most men live in centres of their own’. There is no better illustration of the dangers of sundering one’s consciousness from the universal than the horrific selfviolence of Kurtz’s devouring subjectivity. Eliot’s poem ‘Marina’ () is preceded by a scene of chaos and disaffection akin to Kurtz’s, its epigraph opening on Hercules’s discovery of his family’s slaughter at his own maddened hands. Unlike Kurtz (and Eliot’s hollow men), however, the composite paternal consciousness of ‘Marina’ finds the hope of recognition and redemption in the dissolving possibilities of the dim, mist-shrouded world of islands and sea: What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands ... What images return O my daughter. (P )

In what Harding evocatively calls its ‘supple interweaving of the silences, dislocated syntax and the full proud sail of Shakespeare’s late style’,

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Luminous Recognitions

‘Marina’ charts a course through the fog of Herculean solipsism into an archipelago of soft light and quiet possibility. A year earlier, Eliot had described Hell not as a place ‘but a state . . . man is damned or blessed in the creatures of his imagination . . . Hell, though a state, is a state which can only be thought of, and perhaps only experienced, by the projection of sensory images’. In its epigraph of near-surreal horror, and movement through the depredations of sty and glittering conceit to a state of grace realised in the fragrant pines and the song of the wood thrush, the poem journeys from the Hell of the self to the transcendence wrought by evocations of something (and someone) beyond. Immersion in a crepuscular, dream-like landscape is a condition of vision for the denizens of Eliot’s poetry: it signifies movement into a mythological state of perception ‘throbbing between two lives’. Eliot uses the poetic language of shadow and light in order to create a visionary environment in the manner of his  description of Dante, as a ‘disciplined kind of dreaming’. In The Waste Land, ‘the violet hour’ brings a shift from the indigence of Mr. Eugenides’s insinuations into a liminal space between present and past self, where Tiresias: . . . can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea . . . (P )

The ‘sailor’ is ‘the “longshore” or “dory” fisherman, who returns at nightfall’, and who reappears elliptically in ‘The Dry Salvages’ rounding the headland bound for home. In ‘What the Thunder Said’, the tectonic destruction of the ‘Unreal’ city ‘cracks and reforms’ in ‘the violet air’. The word recurs seven lines later, in the passage of the poem that owes most to the Symbolists: A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings . . .

(P )

In the poem’s final passage, ‘a broken Coriolanus’ may look for revivification ‘only at nightfall’ when ‘aethereal rumours’ may be descried (P ). The ‘violet hour’ is linked to the idea of turning – so important to AshWednesday – a meditative turn inwards, away from mundane distractions. Ash-Wednesday renounces ‘the infirm glory of the positive hour’ and retreats into ‘the cool of the day’ where symbols are clothed in flesh



Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

(‘three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree’) and bones given voice to sing ‘chirping’ (P –). Twilight is a time of readjustment to a form of vision less immediately acute, but more capacious, which peers into the azure shadows at the outer edges of awareness, and anticipates the ambiguous softness of the gathering dark. Twilight occurs twice: in the morning (between first light at dawn, and sunrise over the horizon) and at night (between sunset, and last light at dusk). In Eliot’s poetry of ‘hints and guesses’, twilight is the ideal visual expression of the dynamic communion between light and darkness. In his  essay on Tennyson, Eliot evokes the negative potential of twilight when unhealthily prolonged into a state of artistic stasis, a lingering psychological purgatory: or rather . . . twilight, for Tennyson faced neither the darkness nor the light in his later years. The genius, the technical power persisted to the end, but the spirit had surrendered. A gloomier end than that of Baudelaire: Tennyson had no singulier avertissement . . . having turned aside from the journey through the dark night . . . 

This suggests that twilight cannot be a constant state. A similar proscription is suggested by the deathly twilight of The Hollow Men. Ash-Wednesday’s renunciatory Christianity requires that it view earthly existence as a ‘dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying’ and as a ‘time of tension between dying and birth’. Yet even in its portrayal of life as a mordant ‘wavering between the profit and the loss’ it evokes the submarine journeying of ‘Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead’, who forgot ‘the profit and loss’ in The Waste Land’s ‘Death by Water’. In the sixth part of Ash-Wednesday, the ‘brief transit where the dreams cross’ is a ‘place of solitude’, entry into which fructifies the landscape, shakes voices from the yew, and foreshadows the ‘token of the word unheard, unspoken’ (P ). As well as suggesting a slow dying away in the manner of Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods () and Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (), l’heure bleue is a time of innocence and creation. To ‘fare forward’ ‘through the evening, through the violet air’ like the discarded sailors of The Waste Land draft who reappear in ‘The Dry Salvages’ (Facs –, ) can equally be to travel back (‘to ring the bell backward’, as ‘Little Gidding’ has it), a psychological reckoning with the past. In ‘Little Gidding’ it is the ‘uncertain hour before morning’ that marks the moment of suspension of human consciousness between being in and outside of time.

Luminous Recognitions

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Eliot was acutely aware of these distinctions, as is made clear in his persistent worrying over the characterisation of the half-light setting for the ghostly encounter in ‘Little Gidding’. In one draft, the familiar compound ghost is encountered ‘in the first faint light’; elsewhere, the moment is denoted by ‘lantern-end’ or ‘lantern-out’. In a letter to John Hayward on  September , Eliot writes: It is surprisingly difficult to find words for the shades before morning; we seem to be richer in words and phrases for the end of day. And I don’t want a phrase which might mean either . . . There is very likely some dialect word for this degree of dawn; but even if I could find it it probably wouldn’t do.

Two days later he wrote again: I am still however wrestling with the demon of that precise degree of light at that precise time of day . . . I have been fiddling with something like this: The stranger in the antelucan dusk The stranger at the antelucan hour

That Eliot employs the figure of ‘wrestling with the demon’ – almost the same figure used in his agonised description of the process of poetic creation in ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ – suggests how tightly bound together half-light and creation are in his mind. The light would eventually be described as ‘the waning dusk’. Eliot carried the difficulty of that poetic decision with him for a decade after the poem was completed, returning to it in a lecture delivered at a conference in Nice in , ‘Scylla and Charybdis’. Ricks points out: ‘Waning’ can indeed move in the direction which Eliot said he sought: O.E.D.  is ‘Decreasing or declining in importance, power, influence, etc.’, and if dusk mostly has its affinities with darkness . . . then a decrease or decline in darkness is an increase in light. But O.E.D. ‘waning’ , ‘Of the moon’, and O.E.D. , ‘Of light, or a luminary: Declining in lustre, tending towards extinction’, ‘Of the day: drawing to a close’, are necessarily so powerful, so natural and ubiquitous, as to make ‘waning’ convey a sense of less light, not more . . . So that the adjective which Eliot chose in order to clarify the matter has the paradoxical effect of perpetuating the uncertainty, though in a much more richly elusive manner. Eliot’s imagination defied his conscious wishes, and the phrase – in its evocation of eerie process and in its uncoercive aptness to the haunting equivocation of the whole scene (the vision by night is an illumination, and daybreak is likely to bring disfigured obfuscation) – is a glory of the poem.

Twilight limits quotidian vision and prefaces darkness, but also allows a perception of the spectral forms that hover at the corners of sight.



Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

In The Waste Land these spectres are Greek sages, Roman generals, and hazy archetypes engendered by Baudelaire and Jung. They elevate the obfuscations of gradual darkness from the emotional smallness of the typist’s darkened stairs to the level of half-remembered myth. The peregrinations of Four Quartets are less ostentatiously mythic, preferring instead the symbolism of movement ‘down the passage’, ‘through the first gate’, leaving ‘the rough road . . . behind the pig-sty’. Yet each poem nevertheless enacts a descent into illuminating darkness that has parallels in psychology and mythology. The outright terminology of twilight and violet hour that prevails in earlier poems is eschewed in favour of more luminously suggestive images. The ‘dim light: neither daylight . . . nor darkness’ of ‘Burnt Norton’, the falling light of the ‘deep lane . . . dark in the afternoon’ of ‘East Coker’, the space between midnight and the dawn in ‘The Dry Salvages’, and ‘the uncertain hour before the morning’ of ‘Little Gidding’ each presage a visionary moment of supernatural import accompanying a descent into pregnant Cimmerian darkness. In its very indeterminacy, twilight becomes a potent place of encounter – James with Shakespeare (‘extemporising in the summer twilight’), Frazer with the Nemian Diana at the close of The Golden Bough (‘It is evening, and as we climb the long slope of the Appian Way . . . we look back and see the sky aflame with sunset . . . but we turn from it and pursue our way darkling along the mountain side, till we come to Nemi’), Eliot with Dante, Virgil, and the other shades in the ‘waning dusk’ of the streetscape of ‘Little Gidding’. As Warner says, the twilight world of shadows ‘is the natural habitat of the doppelgänger, who is itself a shade and inhabits a twilight realm, be it the gloomy wynds of Edinburgh, as in James Hogg’s Private Memoirs, or the rain-soaked streets of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.’ The third section of ‘Burnt Norton’ imagines a rupturing not only of an individual consciousness, but of the entire reality that sustains the fragile faces ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’. The poem draws the reader into the chasm between the surface appearances of existence and the spiritual urgency of the underlying pattern. It exposes the windblown viscera of a ‘time-ridden’ world with no faculty for concentration. The tight-packed urban hills are under siege by elemental forces that threaten to overthrow their fragile order, a ‘cold wind / That blows before and after time’. Eliot’s wind is a wind of change that, although abrasive, carries a seed of relief. Sweeping from the high places of London’s northern ridge, it disperses the empty niceties of a civilisation grown necrotic, scattering ‘Men and bits of paper . . . into the faded air’. The awareness that begins to flicker over ‘strained time-ridden faces’

Luminous Recognitions

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holds the possibility of a partial redemption for the confounded denizens of Eliot’s ‘twittering world’ (P ). The ‘twittering world’ carries a double weight. The imbecilic exhalations of ‘unwholesome lungs’ are surely implied, but the phrase also recalls the ‘bats with baby faces’ that ‘whistled, and beat their wings’ in ‘the violet light’ of The Waste Land. In ‘What the Thunder Said’ this scene presages the moment when the waters break and the thunder speaks. In ‘Burnt Norton’, the ‘dim light’ of Part Three is a form of purgatory, its ‘disaffection’ a healthy detachment from a corrupted state of being. The medial light is: . . . neither daylight Investing form with lucid stillness ... Nor darkness to purify the soul.

(P )

The ‘dim light’ initiates a poetic vision of the wind that whirls through a biblical ‘time before and time after’ and that would sweep the seeker into the ‘internal darkness’ that foreshadows the renunciation of the sensory world. It is a place hinted at but avoided in ‘Burnt Norton’, but faced finally in ‘East Coker’. In its contours of bleak despair, Part Three’s ‘O dark dark dark’ (P ) is a strangled echo of Milton’s ‘O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon.’ George Steiner, reading Dante’s works as ‘an unbroken meditation on creation, seen poetically, metaphysically and theologically’, locates the source of its imaginative wonder in the trope of divine light already argued by Neoplatonists and Duns Scotus. Both genesis and consequent existentiality are direct emanations of the divine viva luce. Like St Bonaventura before him, the Pilgrim conceives of God as light proprissime. This light takes on a ‘liquid’ tenor. God is eterno fonte.

Given this, it is unsurprising that the luminary dimension of Eliot’s postconversion poetry should be responsive to the chiaroscuro of a cosmos at once modern and Dantean. The poetic voice of ‘Choruses from The Rock’ invokes ‘The Light Invisible’, ‘Invisible Light’. At first, this strikes the ear as another in the pattern of poetic paradoxes woven through Eliot’s later poetry (in the manner of ‘still and still moving’ and ‘in and out of time’), or as simple variation on Milton’s invocation in the ‘Hymn of the Nativity’ of

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Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

‘That glorious form, that light insufferable’. But Eliot’s phrase must be understood literally in order that its full importance might be felt. The physicist Arthur Zajonc describes a scientific exhibit he created in which a box is fabricated so that light does not illuminate any of its interior surfaces, allowing any light shone into the box to be viewed as in an empty region of space. The box is filled with pure light from an external projector. Looking into the box, one can see only darkness. Of course, scientists have been aware of light frequencies (such as ultraviolet light) imperceptible to human eyes since James Clerk Maxwell proposed the spectrum of light in , but even light within the visible spectrum is invisible until it has some object to shine upon. Otherwise, our view of the universe would be suffused with light. Photons (particles of light) occupy the emptiness of space, as they radiate out from their stellar sources, but are invisible until they hit asteroids, dust, debris, and planets. Eliot’s invisible light is the unseen principle of illumination that inhabits the empty spaces, the hidden light that suffuses the darkness. It is an idea drawn directly from the physics of Einstein and Eddington, which takes the ray of light soaring through a vacuum as its salient image. It takes the magniloquence of Milton’s suffusion and obscures it within the interstellar vacuum of the modern universe. After the (hidden) blaze of light in ‘Choruses from The Rock’, Eliot returned two years later to the ianthine shadows of the ‘violet hour’ in ‘Burnt Norton’. The graceful abstractions of the poem’s opening gradually resolve into images, as illumination builds through Part One. The scene in the garden reposes in ‘the vibrant air’ of Autumn’s heat, until the shifting sunbeams give birth to a glittering pool ‘out of heart of light’. This is the moment when light crests in ‘Burnt Norton’. Aside from the remembrance of this moment later in the same passage (P –), such blinding lucency is not attained again until ‘Little Gidding’, when ‘the brief sun flames the ice . . . a glare that is blindness in the early afternoon’ (P ). Reflecting on the ‘grace of sense’ bestowed and then retracted, Part Two of ‘Burnt Norton’ situates its litany of moments granting ‘a little consciousness’ in the half-light of ‘the moment in the arbour where the rain beat’ and ‘the moment in the draughty church at smokefall’ (P ). Acknowledging that ‘human kind / Cannot bear very much reality’, ‘Burnt Norton’ follows the exhortation of the bird and leaves the rose garden. Rather than attempting a re-enactment of the direct experience of the ‘heart of light’, the poem descends via the enshrouding light of ‘smokefall’ to a noisome and disaffected London twilight (P ).

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Luminous Recognitions

‘East Coker’ charts a further poetic movement into darkness. The second stanza splits its evocation of the play of light and shadow on open fields across the line ending, creating a definitive prediction for the darkening action to come: ‘Now the light falls’. Light is alternately shut out (the laneways are ‘shuttered’ and ‘dark in the afternoon’) or absorbed (‘In a warm haze the sultry light / Is absorbed, not refracted’). Part Three conveys a stark, spiritually austere movement of darkness: O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, And dark the Sun and Moon . . .

(P )

This is figured as an ending, rather than a beginning. The hieratic chant consigns the highborn and the low to an icy vacuum (‘the vacant into the vacant’) reminiscent of Cocytus, the frozen ninth circle of Dante’s Hell. The descent into the abyss in ‘East Coker’ has often been read in parallel with the descent into ‘Internal darkness’ of ‘Burnt Norton’, which occasions a renunciation of the sensory world and descent into radical spiritual passivity. Yet the later passage is replete with other energies. Inner and outer darkness are, rightly, distinct concepts in the Quartets, formalised and separated by their contexts. The descent into inner vacuity in ‘Burnt Norton’ is preceded by the ‘cold wind’ that ‘blows before and after time’; the descent in ‘East Coker’ into external, oceanic darkness follows from the early, more hopeful ‘dawn wind’ across the sea, and an interplanetary ‘vortex’ that sweeps the poem’s plane of action into high metaphysical drama. The planetary dimension of Part Three’s disintegrative, chaotic motion (which picks up on the ‘constellated wars’ of the earlier section) is reasserted by the ‘vacant interstellar spaces’ and the extinguishing of the ‘Sun and Moon’. This is particularly significant because the cosmos, constantly expanding, perpetually in motion, is sharply distinct in quality and potentiality from the paralytic, eschatological stasis of Dante’s lake of ice. In the litany of darkness in Part Three, each form is deliberately externalised: the gaps between stars, the darkness of the grave (destination of the silent funeral), the theatre when the lights go down, the underground train pausing between stations. Each is a credible depiction of a sensory experience of darkness, which mirrors the metaphysical vacancies of the poem’s targets. Rather than a nihilistic absence, the darkness of ‘East Coker’ is ‘the darkness of god’, the ‘invisible light’ of ‘Choruses from The Rock’. The ‘darkness of God’, as annihilatory and painful as it may be, is also the darkness of creation. The infolded processes of light out of



Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

darkness, of movement concealed within stillness, are present but unapprehended. The expectant darkness is filled with latent illumination, the prelight of poetic realisation: ‘So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.’ Eliot’s use of metaphor draws on his understanding of Dantean allegory as, in essence, ‘clear visual images.’ This designation is both spiritual and aesthetic, stretching back perhaps to Eliot’s studies at Harvard, where he read Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (), which juxtaposes lines by Vaughan and Blake as embodying a mystical vision of the world ‘whereby an ineffable radiance, a beauty and a reality never before suspected are perceived by a sort of clairvoyance shining in the meanest things’. Clarity of vision – in its etymological and psycho-spiritual dimensions – underlies Eliot’s disparate references to the ‘merciless clairvoyance’ of Henry James and the ‘terrifying clairvoyance’ of Shakespeare. Eliot’s visual images follow Dante in using light (and its absence) as a ‘means of making the spiritual visible’: Nowhere in poetry has experience so remote from ordinary experience been expressed so concretely, by a masterly use of that imagery of light which is the form of certain types of mystical experience.

Eliot felt that a spiritual appreciation of, for example, ‘the various states and stages of blessedness’ in Dante’s Paradiso, could only occur once we are made to ‘apprehend sensuously’: ‘It is a matter of gradual adjustment of our vision.’ Dantean illumination flares in the consummation of ‘Little Gidding’: When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.

This burning spirit-knot draws deeply on the conclusion to the Paradiso. The penultimate Canto (XXXII) delineates the patternings of the Celestial Rose, providing Eliot with one element of his crowning image. Canto XXXIII concludes the Paradiso with the pilgrim’s eyes being cleansed, that he may perceive a consummate vision of the universe, in which rings of light reflect and refract God’s radiance, and divine Love ‘moves the sun and the other stars’. Eliot quotes Canto XXXIII, lines – in ‘Dante’, giving the translation (in part): Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one mass, the scattered leaves of the universe: substance and accidents and their relations,

Luminous Recognitions

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as though together fused, so that what I speak of is one simple flame. The universal form of this complex I think I saw, because, as I say this, more largely I feel myself rejoice. One single moment to me is more lethargy than twenty-five centuries upon the enterprise which made Neptune wonder at the shadow of the Argo (passing over him).

In his last sustained poetic statement, Eliot (like Eddington) moved beyond the gaps and indeterminacies of modern physics to an infolding view of light as the great spiritual constant: a fluid, flame-like energy that united the ‘substance and accidents’ of the material universe. Notes  ‘A few words, sharp and bright: that was all’. Eliot’s psychologist, Dr. Roger Vittoz, on the psychological luminescence of words, quoted in Henriette Lefebvre, Un ‘Sauveur’, Le Docteur Vittoz (Paris, ), p. .  Ibid., p. .  Amanda Jeremin Harris, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Mental Hygiene’, Journal of Modern Literature / (summer ), .  Ibid., .  Reprinted in The Sacred Wood, ‘The Perfect Critic’ first appeared in two parts in the Athenaeum: ‘The Perfect Critic [i]’, Athenaeum ( Jul. ), –; and ‘The Perfect Critic [ii]’, Athenaeum ( Jul. ), –. See Prose II, pp. –.  Nicholas J. Wade, and Josef Brožek, Purkinje’s Vision: The Dawning of Neuroscience (Mahwah, ), p. .  Canto XXXII, lines –, The Divine Comedy II: Purgatory, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers (London, ), p. .  Gage, Colour and Meaning, pp. –.  Canto XXIX, lines –, Dante, Purgatory, p. .  ‘Dante’, Prose III, p. .  Observations and Experiments Investigating the Physiology of Senses () and New Subjective Reports about Vision ().  Wade and Brožek, Purkinje’s Vision, p. xi.  ‘First Review of Elements of Folk Psychology: Outlines of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind, by Wilhelm Wundt. Trans. Edward Leroy Schaub’, Prose I, p. . First published in the International Journal of Ethics / (Jan. ), –.  Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Physiology of Organs of Skin, MS Am . (), Houghton Library, Harvard University. See Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, pp. –.  ‘First Review of Elements of Folk Psychology’, Prose I, pp. –.  ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’ (), Prose II, pp. –. First published as ‘Euripides and Gilbert Murray: A Performance at the Holborn Empire’, Arts & Letters / (spring ), –.

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Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

 Wade and Brožek, Purkinje’s Vision, p. .  Letter to Montgomery Belgion,  Feb. , Churchill College Archives Centre, Cambridge.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Scientific Studies, trans. Douglas Miller (New York, ), p. xix.  ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, OPP, p. .  Darwin, ‘New Experiments’, .  Gage, Colour and Meaning, pp. –.  Gregory C. Richter (ed.), Albert Giraud’s Pierrot Lunaire (Kirksville, ), pp. –, –.  Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Henry Weinfield (Berkeley, ), pp. –.  David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry: From the s to the High Modernist Mode (Boston, ), p. .  Austell Clarke, quoted in Perkins, Modern Poetry, p. . Compare Ruskin’s contiguous, encroaching cloud-light of industrialisation in The Storm-Cloud of the th Century ().  Lawrence Rainey (ed.), The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (Devon, ), p. .  Note the conjunction of the ‘violet hour’ in The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘Me sits there with his augur’s rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking’. Stanley Sultan, Eliot, Joyce and Company (Oxford, ), pp. –.  Compare A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i.–: ‘Now the wasted brands do glow, / Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud’.  More closely related are the avian sing-song rhymes of ‘Landscapes: V. Cape Ann’: ‘O quick quick quick, quick hear the song-sparrow, / Swamp-sparrow, fox-sparrow, vesper sparrow / At dawn and dusk’ (P ).  SV, II, p. .  ‘Mystic and Politician as Poet: Vaughan, Traherne, Marvell, Milton’ (), Prose IV, pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Conrad, Heart of Darkness, pp. , , , .  Ibid., p. .  Smith, Poetry and Plays, p. .  Harding, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Shakespeare’.  ‘Dante’, Prose III, p. .  Ibid., p. .  ‘In Memoriam’, p. .  Gardner, Composition of Four Quartets, pp. , .  Quoted ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, OPP, p. .

Luminous Recognitions



 ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, Agenda /– (spring–summer ). First published (in French) as ‘Charybde et Scylla: Lourdeur et Frivolite’, Annales de Centre Universitaire Mediterraneen (Nice, ), –.  Ricks, ‘A Note on Little Gidding’, .  James, ‘Introduction to The Tempest’, p. .  Frazer emphasises the indeterminacy of twilight, relating the Indian story of Indra, who ‘swore to the demon Namuci that he would slay him neither by day nor by night . . . But . . . killed him in the morning twilight’. This ‘occupies that sort of intermediate or nondescript position between earth and sky or sea and sky in which primitive man sees safety.’ James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, vol.  (London, ), p. .  Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, p. .  John Milton, ‘Samson Agonistes’ (), line . Despite the Miltonic darkness of his rendering, Eliot oddly refers to Milton’s ‘twilit Hell’ in ‘Milton I’, OPP, p. .  Steiner, Grammars of Creation, pp. –.  Eliot quotes this line in his discussion of Milton in ‘Mystic and Politician as Poet’ (), Prose IV, p. .  Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (New York, ), p. .  Eddington opens his  Swarthmore Lecture with a description of the primeval chaos at the formation of the universe, depicted as ‘the germs of the things that are to be’, and echoing the words of Genesis :: ‘In the beginning was vastness, solitude and the deepest night. Darkness was upon the face of the deep, for as yet there was no light.’ Eddington, Unseen World, p. . Compare ‘Choruses from The Rock’, Part Seven: ‘In the beginning GOD created the world. Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep’ (P ).  ‘East Coker’, P .  ‘Dante’, Prose III, p. .  Quoted in Prose IV, n. , p. .  ‘In Memory’, Prose I, p. .  ‘Andrew Marvell’ (), Prose II, p. .  ‘Dante’, Prose III, p. .  Ibid., pp. , .  Dante, The Divine Comedy III: Paradise, trans. Mark Musa (London, ), p. .  ‘Dante’, Prose III, p. . Compare the echo of Neptune’s wonder ‘at the shadow of the Argo (passing over him)’ in ‘Choruses from The Rock’: ‘Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward / And see the light that fractures through unquiet water’ (P ).

 

Things Dying and New Born: Gestation and Resurrection

. . . thou mettest with things dying, I with things new-born.

– Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, III.iii

 

His Dark Materials

Would you have me False to my nature? Rather say, I play The Man I am.

– Shakespeare, Coriolanus, III.ii.–

I have suggested some of the ways Eliot imagined the process of poetic composition drawing variously on elemental and scientific registers. The final cluster of metaphors centres on the creative process embodied in a shadowy other self, submerged within the artist. This most intimate ‘physiology of poetry’ reflects Eliot’s turn inwards, conceptualising the creative seed as a shrouded presence, in Eliot’s phrase, a ‘dark embryo within’. Motifs of gestation, introspection, descent, and resurrection figure prominently, as do multiple self-doublings – doppelgängers, hollow men, and the alter egos, animas, and shadows of twentieth-century psychology. In its ambiguity of action, the French term dédoublement expresses more clearly than the English ‘doubling’ the twin processes of multiplication and splitting that so frequently attend upon each other in the literature of duality. As Eliot wrote of Shakespeare, ‘the greatest poetry, like the greatest prose, has a doubleness’ about it. He understood that this duality manifested in the artist, a composite (and sometimes fragmented) figure: ‘a man who is capable of experience finds himself in a different world in every decade of his life; as he sees it with different eyes’. Early in his career he had been enthralled by Laforgue, a poet who managed (as Eliot wrote) ‘to express a dédoublement of the personality against which the subject struggles.’ In  Eliot looked back on the evolving processes of his poetic composition, discerning three ‘voices’: the poet to himself, the poet to an audience, and the poet assuming a character. Eliot characterised the intimate ‘first voice’ as emanating from an unconscious ‘germ’: 



Gestation and Resurrection What you start from is nothing so definite as an emotion, in any ordinary sense; it is still more certainly not an idea; it is – to adapt two lines of Beddoes to a different meaning – a Bodiless childful of life in the gloom Crying with frog voice, ‘what shall I be?’ 

Eliot’s ‘dark embryo’ is a variation on this image, taken from the nineteenth-century poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Death’s Jest-Book ()). But where Beddoes’s figure remains forever a ‘poor unborn ghost’, Eliot’s often takes on flesh. Its generative properties are perceptible in a way that the shades that haunted the poets of the s were not. As a critic, Eliot made several attempts to describe his sense of a second self, although he resiled from its full exposure. He wrote of Coleridge: for a few years he had been visited by the Muse (I know of no poet to whom this hackneyed metaphor is better applicable) and thenceforth was a haunted man . . . anyone who has ever been visited by the Muse is haunted. (UP )

It is tempting to read this description as an implicit self-portrait because of its evident empathy with Coleridge, because of the references in the same passage to the ‘ghastly shadows’ of the Eumenides (who appear as harrying presences in The Family Reunion), and because Eliot ends the book in which the passage appears by – in effect – affirming this view: ‘The sad ghost of Coleridge beckons to me from the shadows’ (UP ). Yet Eliot’s haunting presence was not Coleridge’s (nor Lionel Johnson’s, nor Dowson’s). The cultivated image of the ‘Muse’ suggests visitation by a supernal figure in its full power. The compulsion felt by the poet under the power of the Muse is experienced as an external pressure, a terrifying visitation. Even in those cases where the Muse possesses the poet, such entrancements are markedly different from the experience of invasion by something alien within. Eliot’s insistence on the aptness of the figure of the Muse, whose brilliance is veiled and made comprehensible by a human face, distances Coleridge’s creative power from his own rending sense of ‘invasion’. The metaphors Eliot applies in writing about his own poetry tend to be more latent, generative, and elemental, stripped of a humanising face. In ‘The Music of Poetry’ Eliot refers to ‘the germ of a poem’ that may be ‘quickened’, and reacts negatively to forensic analysis of a poem’s ‘meaning’, as an ‘embryology’ (although he was later willing to admit that ‘every poem has its own embryological pattern’). A decade later, Eliot spoke of ‘something germinating in him for which he must find words’. The poet

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His Dark Materials

is not a securely defined figure, haunted by distinct external entities. He is porous and fragmented, subject to ‘the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being,’ and liable to ‘saturation’ in his own ungoverned depths (UP , ). Eliot describes the creative germ as the ‘unknown, dark psychic material . . . with which the poet struggles’. The phrase echoes Milton’s Paradise Lost: Into this wilde Abyss, The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave, Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, But all these in their pregnant causes mixt Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight, Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain His dark materials to create more Worlds . . . 

Eliot’s creative logic retains an aspect of the divine poet-as-maker, but the effect is not hubristic. Where Milton’s Almighty may ordain, Eliot’s poet can only struggle against something unknown. Yet even in the image of struggle, reminiscent of Jacob’s struggle with the obscured figure who appears in the darkness and departs at dawn, there is a sense of the poet as more than human, both blessed and maimed by the confrontation. Like Milton, Eliot locates the struggle in a ‘wilde abyss’: he once described human consciousness (following The Tempest) as extending into a ‘dark . . . backward and abysm of time’. Importantly, this space is not an aspect of the world as constructed by a presiding intention (as in Paradise Lost), but exists within the poet. Milton’s verse sheds further light on Eliot’s approach to composition, in its pairing of birth and death (‘the Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave’), as a necessary element in creation. Eliot combined the two in ‘Journey of the Magi’ (): I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

(P )

(This pairing also, of course, figures in the ‘crisscross’ structure of Marina, and of the recognition scene that underlies it – Pericles’s ‘Did you not name a tempest, / A birth, and death?’ (V, iii).) Milton’s interweaving of womb, grave, abyss, and metamorphic matter foreshadows Eliot’s description of the autonomic processes of his poetic creativity. The German word for abyss, Abgrund ‘meant originally the ground, or that which is undermost, the soil, in which things root and on which they stand.’ Something

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Gestation and Resurrection

of this is present in Eliot’s rebuttal of Matthew Arnold’s view that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life: ‘At bottom: that is a great way down; the bottom is the bottom. At the bottom of the abyss is what few ever see, and what those cannot bear to look at for long; and it is not a “criticism of life”’ (UP ). Arnold’s ‘notion of “life”, in his account of poetry, does not . . . go deep enough’. The creative process necessitates ‘sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end’ (UP ). In a draft of The Family Reunion, Harry refers to his hope of ‘a new world, in the deep, in the abyss of light’. In Eliot’s mid-life formulations, the dark material is ‘incubating within the poet’ (UP ), ‘rude’ and ‘unknown’. Its shape is fluid: a ‘creative germ’, ‘octopus or angel’, ‘an inert embryo’, an ‘egg’ whose contents are necessarily unknown ‘until the shell breaks’. Eliot characterises his own experience as a ‘morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster’ (UP , ), combining death and fertility in the same doubleness of meaning as the Elizabethan punning on dying as orgasm. While the pearl conjures the deathly transformations of King Alonso and Phlebas the Phoenician, its morbid secretions recall a series of verses Pound wrote to Eliot during the revision of The Waste Land: ‘Sage Homme’ links the poet’s ‘foaming and abundant cream’ to the ‘stiff saliva’ of an oyster, that ‘diligent diver’. Eliot’s use of visceral extracts from The Midwives’ Gazette to characterise his poetry with the violent physicality of birth and death further underscores the connection. In critical language far removed from the gory immediacy of these private communications, Eliot finds in the ‘simple effusions’ of the Elizabethan critics the ‘embryo’ of critical questions to come (UP ). The Eliot of the Norton Lectures and ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ is largely divested of classicist inhibitions regarding the unconscious, a poet finally able to admit the degree of daemonic possession and psychogenic self-division inherent in his creativity. The apparently impersonal poet accepted that poetry acts to ‘make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate’ (UP ). In his  Shakespeare lecture he spoke of being ‘aware of an immense and perhaps unconscious reserve power’ in the psychological hinterland of Shakespeare’s verse. Eliot’s metaphors of psychological stratification are inflected by Freud’s idiom, although Eliot would have resisted the connection. Similar imagery is present even in Eliot’s earliest critical and poetic writings, connecting the embryonic, chthonic, and vegetative in a composite of

His Dark Materials



recognisably Jungian symbolism. In Doubles, Karl Miller searches out instances of the dynamic metaphor of the second self, which was to conjure up . . . the hallucinated double of ancient superstition, to generate, in popular and para-medical contexts, the hypothesis of a supervention, within the individual, of autonomous and adversary selves.

For Miller, literary duality implies ‘the vertiginous human being who can “call upon two deep and divided halves of himself”.’ Miller sees ‘Hazlitt’s protean Shakespeare and Keats’s negative capability’ as multiple aspects of duality, arguing that ‘Shakespearian duality has been pervasive, and Shakespeare is pervaded by duality.’ Instability of identity pervades modernism: Samuel Beckett was doubly haunted, by a ‘presence, embryonic, undeveloped, of a self that might have been but never got born, an être manqué’ and by an ‘être assassiné’, ‘a murdered being’ that the writer was compelled to bring back to life. Virginia Woolf wrote of the need ‘to live and live till we have lived out those embryo lives which attend about us in early youth until “I” suppressed them.’ As its unfinished shape suggests, the embryo gestating in the dark of the poet’s psyche is a compound of psychological fetches, drawing variously on post-Darwinian imaginings of primordial humanity, psychoanalytic imagery of the suppressed alter ego, the supernatural trope of the doppelgänger, and the vocal eidola of the Homeric tradition. Eliot’s poetic images of unreal life are ambivalent responses to these vital and terrible figures. Incarnations appear most clearly in The Hollow Men, ‘Animula’, ‘Marina’, and ‘The Dry Salvages’, and in the climactic realisation of the ‘familiar compound ghost’ in ‘Little Gidding’. After his nervous breakdown, Eliot wrote to Richard Aldington in November  of his plans for psychological recuperation: ‘My idea is to consult, and perhaps stay some time under, Vittoz, who is said to be the best mental specialist in Europe’. Eliot diagnosed himself as suffering from ‘an aboulie and emotional derangement which has been a life-long affliction.’ This phrase absorbs the terminology of contemporary psychiatry, but strikes the modern ear as quaintly pre-Freudian in its focus on process (‘derangement’) over symbol. (Eliot likely drew the term aboulie – ‘lack of will’ – from Vittoz’s textbook.) When Eliot completed the final section of The Waste Land under Vittoz’s care in Lausanne, he incorporated the diagnosis (abolie for aboulie) into his poem, imbuing it with archetypal resonance, in Nerval’s phrase: ‘Le Prince d’Acquitaine à la tour abolie’ (P ). The psychological and the poetic are closely interwoven in Eliot’s

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Gestation and Resurrection

poetry. As in ‘Whispers of Immortality’ (), with its attempts ‘to seize and clutch and penetrate’ and thus allay ‘the fever of the bone’ (P ), in Eliot’s acts of poetic creation, the febrile and the fertile are never far apart. In the early twentieth century, investigations of human origins had largely shifted from looking backwards and begun to look inwards. Eliot’s ‘dark embryo’ conception of the creative impulse as a latent but powerful presence in the unconscious appears to draw on depth psychology, which emphasises the psychodynamics of the unconscious (founding figures: Pierre Janet, William James, Freud, Jung, and Alfred Adler). Jung had briefly studied under Janet while in Paris in , on leave from his position at the Burghölzli. Later, Adler, Jung, and Freud were colleagues in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society convened by Freud (Adler split acrimoniously from the group in ; Jung famously followed suit in ). At Harvard, Eliot took copious notes from Janet’s Névroses et idées fixes (), and was therefore familiar with at least one major motif of depth psychology, the idea that images or symbols (idées fixes) might function within the mind like negative totems, bringing about a dissociation, or splitting, of the personality into multiple selves. During the period of his graduate reading, Eliot’s poetic idiom became increasingly infused with the language of psychology, which gave an attenuated form to his sense of uncertainty, diffusion, and dream-like inaction. Eliot picked out Pound’s visionary ‘Eyes, dreams, lips and the night goes’ in his  review of Personae, motifs he would himself use to portray the crisis of fragmentation in The Hollow Men – ‘Eyes I dare not meet in dreams’, ‘Lips that would kiss’. In  Eliot associated ‘the clinics of Ribot and Janet’ and the ‘books from Vienna’ (presumably Freud and Jung) with ‘Tylor and a few German anthropologists’, perceiving ‘sociology and social psychology’ as two means of investigating the same questions. In  Eliot sent a letter to Pound enclosing a poem that draws its title – ‘Suppressed Complex’ – from pseudo-Freudian and Jungian terminology (‘repressed’ is more properly Freudian, while ‘complex’ suggests Jung’s theory of complexes) and contains the line ‘I was a shadow upright in the corner’. Crawford has described the conjunction of philosophical, anthropological, psychological, and sociological influences that aided Eliot’s generation of ‘Suppressed Complex’: On  October , he heard Collingwood, lecturing on Aristotle’s de Anima, talk of how the soul might be supposed to leave the body and return to it later. Eliot scribbled a reference to Frazer’s treatment of such

His Dark Materials

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experiences in The Golden Bough. By February , he was sending Aiken ‘Suppressed Complex’, a poem about a soul-like shadow dancing in the firelight of a woman’s room, before passing out of the window. In  Eliot recalled ‘Tylor’s dreaming aborigine who finds that his soul in sleep can part company with his body and roam the forests’.

As Grover Smith suggests, ‘Suppressed Complex’ is ‘a poem revelling in stark dissociation of the daring self from the self that must obey custom’. ‘The Burnt Dancer’ () acknowledges the sublimated presences of ‘secret . . . Children’s voices in little corners’ and likens the fluttering of a moth around a flame to flaring images in an obsessive mind: ‘Within the circle of my brain / The twisted dance continues’ (P ). Ronald Bush’s nuanced reading of ‘La Figlia Che Piange’ () demonstrates the poem’s subtle adherence to proto-Jungian modes of psychological identity, without falling into didacticism: The dandy, by comparing the lover’s desertion of his beloved to the mind’s desertion of an exploited body, suggests that at some level, man and girl, lover and beloved, are projections of his own psyche, and that la figlia . . . is an image of his own emotional life . . . He has been cut off from his vital center by an acquired self, and the split seems like the separation of death.

The epigraph, ‘O quam te memorem virgo . . .’ (‘Maiden, how shall I name thee?’), mixing wonder and fear, suggests a consciousness confronted by the figure of its own unnameable ‘centre’. As a critic, Eliot was publicly dismissive of Freud’s psychoanalytical methods, writing, ‘I sometimes think that our own time, with its elaborate equipment of science and psychological analysis, is even less fitted than the Victorian age to appreciate poetry as poetry’. Such pronouncements can in part be understood as Eliot’s defence against the mushrooming growth of psychoanalytic readings of his work (he resented these ‘attempt[s] to find origins . . . in the darker recesses of my private life’). The Waste Land in particular attracted much psychobiographical analysis – some psychologists going so far as to suggest that Eliot’s composition of sections while under therapy amount to ‘a form of partial self-analytic work’ – although Eliot’s entire poetic oeuvre is frequently proffered as an accurate chart of the process of psychoanalytic healing. But what appears to disturb Eliot even more deeply is the reductionism inherent in psychoanalysis – the idea that poems (and people) can be dismantled to reveal forensic clues as to their provenance and meaning. He warned that ‘with or without the tools of the psychologist . . . the attempt to explain the poem by tracing it back to its origins will distract attention from the poem’.

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Explaining the apparent similarities between Freud’s Oedipus complex and Hamlet, A. D. Nuttall writes: Freud was a verbal artist as well as a psychologist, and he specialised in depth – in going deeper, stripping away more coverings than any predecessor; and Shakespeare did the same. It is not so very surprising that a similarity of method should produce at times similar structures of psychological paradox.

While the ‘similar structures of psychological paradox’ are undeniable, to suggest that Shakespeare strips away the coverings with ‘a similarity of method’ to that with which Freud denuded his patients is vastly to mischaracterise the genius behind Hamlet. Freud’s putative method was excavatory, while Shakespeare created complex, suggestive characters without seeking resolution or revelation. Hamlet mines a wealth of Classical and Germanic sources, but enriches its characters with autochthonous detail. Hamlet’s ‘What a piece of work is a man’ implies – without exposing – a being as vertiginous as the ‘quintessence of dust’ is infinite (II.ii.–). Similarly crucial differences exist between Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian psychology. Freud and Jung both pioneered psychologies of the unconscious, but had very different preoccupations. Anthony Stevens notes ‘Freud’s habitual tendency to look backwards, which gave him a reductive concern with origins, and Jung’s tendency to look forwards, which gave him an adaptive concern with goals.’ Jungian psychology attempts a descent without assuming either a fixed passage or single point of origin. To Freud, the ego, id, and libido remained underdeveloped aspects of the self, defined by the formative dynamics of sexual desire and repression. Jung ‘experienced the unconscious as a living, numinous presence’ and ‘companion’ and was obsessively interested in the interplay of uncircumscribed other selves. Jung’s theory of split or part personalities – manifest as archetypes – was related to Janet’s precursor theory of ‘subconscious fixed ideas’. Eliot was more amenable to Jungian psychology than Freudian psychoanalysis, despite his stated resistance to both (in , Eliot reportedly ‘said that he had never read any of Jung’s work’, believing ‘the less psychology a creative writer studies the better for him’). He belatedly found Jung’s ideas about self-actualisation conducive in imagining the concealed dynamics of poetic realisation. Eliot quotes Jung’s discussion of physical events being ascribable to both mechanistic causation (efficient causes) and energic causation (final causes), finding it to be a ‘suggestive analogy’ in ‘the attempt to understand a poem by explaining its origins’:

His Dark Materials

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One can explain a poem by investigating what it is made of and the causes that brought it about . . . But to understand a poem it is also necessary . . . that we should endeavour to grasp what the poetry is aiming to be; one might say . . . endeavouring to grasp its entelechy.

Psychological streams of scientific enquiry combined to irrigate the literature of the early twentieth century with dream imagery and hallucinatory symbols. The contemporary exemplar of this literary tendency is Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle (), a dream novel that follows the internalised narrative of its protagonist, Doctor Fridolin, over two days as he descends into the desirous depths of his own psyche. Schnitzler and Eliot were likely aware of one another, having both repeatedly had work appear in the Dial over the course of . Indeed, The Waste Land appeared in the November  edition alongside an extract from Schnitzler’s novella ‘Doctor Graesler’. Leon Edel writes that in his ‘representational’ approach to dream imagery, James Joyce ‘became the funnel for certain psychoanalytic concepts which were spread to a whole generation of writers which never read Freud or Jung, but used Joyce’s discoveries’, in Eliot’s phrase, to gain ‘free passage to the phantoms of the mind’. Suspicious of the mental excavations of professional psychology, Eliot responded to the mythic and the archetypal in the work of fellow artists (most famously Joyce). In ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ (), Eliot wrote that ‘Psychology . . . ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago’. For Eliot, the pseudo-science of Jungian psychology – filtered through the work of his contemporaries – legitimised an imaginative immersion in symbol, colour, and mood in much the same way that the social sciences of anthropology and comparative religion allowed him to indulge his fascination with the primitive while avoiding being viewed as a primitivist. (Eliot was ‘sensitive about his interests in the primitive’, bristling at Conrad Aiken’s suggestion that a print of Gauguin’s Crucifixion that Eliot brought back from Paris ‘was a kind of sophisticated primitivism’.) The literary diffusion of Jungian depth psychology directed the imagination towards the subterranean springs that might release a poem without requiring that the poet be called to give account of his own dark materials. Jung believed that ‘[i]f a union is to take place between opposites like spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, bright and dark . . . it will happen in a third thing, which represents not a compromise but something new.’ His ‘numinous’ sense of a living mystery at the heart of ‘the psychical life of

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the individual’ preserved for poetry that which, in Eliot’s phrase, ‘matters most’: there is, in all great poetry, something which must remain unaccountable however complete might be our knowledge of the poet, and . . . that is what matters most. When the poem has been made, something new has happened, something that cannot be wholly explained by anything that went before. That, I believe, is what we mean by ‘creation’.

Although Eliot never underwent either Freudian or Jungian examination, he underwent psychological therapy under Dr. Vittoz. After being prescribed a rest cure, Eliot asked fellow neurotic sufferers Ottoline Morrell and Julian Huxley for suggestions as to the best treatment. Both recommended the Swiss psychologist (who also treated William James and Joseph Conrad). Eliot was fully briefed as to what to expect: he read the  French edition of Vittoz’s Traitment des Psychonévroses par la Rééducation du Contrôle Cerebral  prior to attending Vittoz’s clinic. Eliot travelled to Lausanne to undergo treatment, and wrote approvingly to Morrell on  November  from her old room at the Hôtel Ste Luce: I am here . . . and under Vittoz . . . I like him very much personally, and he inspires me with confidence – his diagnosis was good . . . He is putting me through the primary exercises very rapidly . . . Of course I can’t tell much about the method yet, but at moments I feel more calm than I have for many many years – since childhood – that may be illusory – we shall see.

Much scholarly emphasis has been given to Vittoz’s quasi-mystical method of laying hands on his patients’ foreheads to measure the ‘pulsations’, ‘beats’, ‘vibrations’, and ‘undulation’ of their thoughts. Vittoz believed a patient insufficiently in control of his thoughts ‘no longer feels master of himself, but is like a rudderless ship in a storm.’ Scholars have found reference to Vittoz’s method and metaphor in the final section of The Waste Land: The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands

More striking, for my purposes, is the doctor’s emphasis on self-division as the root cause of malady. Vittoz specialised in the treatment of ‘neurasthenia, psychoneurosis or psychasthenia’, all ‘nervous illnesses’.

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He believed that the brain contains ‘two different working centres, called the conscious or objective, and the unconscious or subjective brain.’ The unconscious brain (he believed) is the source of ideas and sensations, while the will and reason reside in the conscious brain. Vittoz imagined that nervous illness – including Eliot’s aboulie – resulted from ‘the want of balance and unity between the two brains . . . the more or less apparent separation of the objective from the subjective brain’. The neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks demonstrates the extent to which interplay and imbalance are still fundamental to our understanding of the brain: ‘a disease is never a mere loss or excess . . . there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be’. Vittoz’s theories represent an earlier, more impressionistic point in the development of cognitive science. Accordingly, he writes of the separate halves of the brain not as a modern neuroscientist might describe the right and left hemispheres or lobes, but as a depth psychologist might describe the separate components of the psyche: ‘when the brain is considering the possibility or impossibility of some action, it is in a sense asking itself a question which is . . . answered by a second consciousness.’ Without sufficient ‘equilibrium’, the patient is ‘distressed by a feeling of being only half awake and in a sort of half-dreamy state from which he cannot escape.’ This theory has much in common with Jung’s concept of homeostasis, the principle, applicable to psychology as it is to biology, that entities attempt to create internal balance – each contains the countervailing pressure of its opposite. Vittoz was an ideal therapist for Eliot, as he did not attempt any regression into the unconscious, thus sparing the patient the pain of reenactment. Trosman writes that Vittoz ‘saw his method as opposed to psychoanalysis. He had no interest in understanding unconscious processes which he believed endangered the unity and integration he attempted to bring about’. As Piette notes, Vittoz’s ‘selling-point was not simply “preFreudian”’, but ‘anti-Freudian in its strong, though confused, emphasis on conscious control over unconscious drives. His simple approach soothed minds fearful of Freudian complexities.’ Some self-examination was required, but it was the patient – not the psychologist – who should attempt to discover the ‘cause and origin’ of anxieties, looking to causative traumas in the past rather than submerged desires or visionary impulses. The patient ‘should be asked to make a rapid examination . . . of all his feelings, thoughts, and even of his ideas . . . This state of consciousness is the “gnothi seauton” of the ancient philosopher; one lacking control

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should, more than most people, know himself . . . in order to become aware of what is good or bad in his brain.’ The unconscious mind was to be subjugated, not confronted. Gold quotes a contemporary cure for neurasthenia, advocated by W. Charles Loosmore in Nerves and the Man (), involving close reading of literary passages for ‘hidden meaning’. This method inverts the Jamesian conceit, in The Figure in the Carpet, that looking for cryptic patterns can induce obsession and mental instability. Presumably, the search for patterns in literary passages was intended to produce a sympathetic ordering of the patient’s psychic landscape, circumventing scrutiny of internal processes. Vittoz attempted to reunite the conscious and unconscious minds (or, in his terminology, the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ halves of the brain) through mental exercises concentrating the will on a symbolic image, recommending patients focus their minds around the overlapping curves of the symbol for infinity. Symbols were thought to be apprehensible to the prelingual unconscious in the same way that Jung described in relation to archetypes. They were a cipher to encourage alignment between the superficial and the submerged in the manner of a key in a lock. The patient was taught to ‘unite all ideas in his mind and to fix them . . . on the one’, picturing ‘a circle of which all the spokes (thoughts) converge to a one as a centre.’ This image is one of many precursors to the dance around ‘the still point of the turning world’ in ‘Burnt Norton’. Vittoz’s description of a dream state from which one cannot escape, assailed by fears, impulses, and ‘impressions . . . over which . . . [the] will has no power’, prefigures Jung’s description of his psychic crisis as ‘a state of disorientation’ in which he ‘felt totally suspended in mid-air . . . An incessant stream of fantasies had been released . . . I was living in a constant state of tension’. The straining by the waking mind towards equilibrium with a deeper stratum of self was a superficially scientific repackaging of Expressivism, which ‘participates in a tradition of philosophical and literary gestures toward the idea of a hidden unconscious, previously understood as the soul’. Expressivism as a conceptualisation of the creative process is distinct from the later purely philosophical use of the term to denote a theory of meta-ethics. Literary Expressivism began just after the turn of the century . . . Expressivists distrusted direct methods of instruction, preferring to evoke writing . . . with techniques designed to stimulate the innate potential of the unconscious mind . . . techniques . . . drawn from models of therapy (Freudian in the s and Gestalt in the s) . . . 

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Harris finds an unacknowledged element of Expressivism in Eliot’s acceptance of Vittoz’s psychological theories and implicit in his later theories of poetic production. Despite disdaining the Freudian neo-Romantic emphasis on self-expression, Eliot sat by Lake Lausanne composing The Waste Land by drawing on the deep wells of pre-logical consciousness disinterred by Vittoz’s pre-Jungian psychology. The introspective element of Eliot’s poetry gained force during the mid–s, overlaying the Jamesian social satire of his earlier poems with a dream-like quality. In  Eliot told an audience that writing poetry ‘takes all your time, even when you are asleep.’ Ash-Wednesday demands a reckoning with the past, its ‘unread vision in the higher dream’ anticipating the admission in ‘The Dry Salvages’ that ‘We had the experience but missed the meaning’ (there, ‘approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form’). In Ash-Wednesday, a veiled Psyche flits between the ridges and furrows of the interior landscape: Here are the years that walk between, bearing Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring One who moves in the time between sleep and waking

The elliptical, dissociative consciousness of Ash-Wednesday (‘Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still’) (P ) reveals the last of the gifts bestowed on Eliot by Vittoz’s treatment, as well as by the religious discipline of prayer and worship: the escape from one’s superficial personality by meditative control. Concentration and surrender of the will (as to the sinuous infolding image of infinity) is a means of escape from endless pursuit by the self: ‘La liberté du vouloir donne cette maîtrise et cette sérénité que rien ne trouble’ (‘The freedom of the will gives control and serenity that nothing can disturb’). The Waste Land’s implicit comparison of poetic consciousness with a boat (each ‘responded / Gaily’ to knowing, controlling hands) is transposed and enriched in ‘Marina’ into an image that elides the building of a boat and the making of a poem. The process of construction takes place within a mist-filled mental landscape, ‘Under sleep, where all the waters meet’. The boat, as a poetic enterprise, has been arrived at unknowingly, its form both completed and ongoing, ‘half conscious, unknown, my own’ (P –). Eliot’s writing is littered with overlapping motifs of splitting, dissociation, and reunification. He told Virginia Woolf that he planned ‘to write a verse play in which the  characters of Sweeney act the parts.’ Grover Smith extrapolates from this that ‘the four sets of subordinate characters [in

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Gestation and Resurrection

Sweeney Agonistes], numbering eight altogether, were destined at first to act as a dismantled model of the protagonist, projected from the character Sweeney as doubled with Pereira.’ Eliot is often considered an ‘impersonal’ poet, thanks to his famous early statement that ‘[p]oetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion . . . not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.’ Gold suggests Vittoz’s book (first published in ) as a possible source for Eliot’s statement: in  Vittoz wrote that the neurasthenic patient ‘has no feeling except for his own personality, which he often detests, but from which he cannot escape.’ If we assume this to be correct, then Eliot’s apparent statement of impersonality in fact expresses a psychological desire for balance between inner and outer selves. As in Vittoz’s description, the artist’s personality figures in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ as a synonym for the conscious mind taken up with the superficial neuroses of its social being. Stead, who sees the ‘dark embryo’ of unconscious energy as central to understanding Eliot’s poesis, argues that Eliot’s argument should be read as advocating ‘an escape further into the self’. This makes sense of Eliot’s later critical pronouncement that ‘our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world’, a deluded evasion remedied by the process of poetic creation, a process that forces acknowledgement of ‘the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being’ (UP ): Distracted from distraction by distraction ... Tumid apathy with no concentration . . . 

The peculiar emphasis given to the term ‘concentration’ in these lines recalls the intensity of an earlier discussion in a  essay. Describing the hardship of mystical revelation, Eliot wrote that revelation involves ‘the most terrible concentration and askesis . . . men like the forest sages . . . Only those have the right to talk of discipline who have looked into the Abyss.’ Concentration, then, continues to be used in Vittoz’s sense, as a means of movement inwards away from superficial distraction. Eliot’s forest sages made a brief and pertinent reappearance in a draft of ‘East Coker’, under the name Aranyakas (in Hindu mysticism, those who belong to the forest): The mind must venture Where it has not been, be separated For a further union, a deeper communion, Aranyaka, the forest or the sea . . . 

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Such a reading of Eliot’s ‘escape from personality’ places it within an existing literary tradition exemplified by Keats’s ‘negative capability’, ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. Eliot’s ideal poet displays the same faculty for fruitful assimilation of chaos and indeterminacy: a poet’s mind . . . is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

The artistic personality from which the poet must escape is therefore only a partial self, an intrusive ego divorced from the wellsprings of the unconscious. The ‘man who suffers’ is only one element of ‘the mind which creates’. Interrogating his own psychological processes of composition, Eliot, like Keats, turned to Shakespeare as the exemplary literary mind able to ‘digest and transmute the passions which are its material’. James had also considered Shakespeare in his discussion of the separation of the Artist from the Man, striving to gaze beyond ‘“the immitigably respectable person” in Stratford who is – to some extent – preserved in the records’, searching for ‘the undetermined figure’. Frustrated, James declares that ‘the figure who supremely interests us, remains as unseen of us as our Ariel, on the enchanted island, remains of the bewildered visitors’. Eliot’s escape from personality can be understood as the manifestation in the individual poet’s mind of a broader need for reunification. He saw the crisis ‘of English poetry . . . [as] not so much daemonic possession as the splitting up of personality’ (UP ). ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ () is Eliot’s chronicle of a rupture in the collective psyche of English letters, written at about the time he was reading Vittoz in preparation for his treatment. It traces the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, which occurred in the seventeenth century, ‘from which we have never recovered’. In Donne and the Elizabethan dramatists (particularly those influenced by Montaigne), Eliot finds ‘a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling’, which is absent in the next generation, exacerbated by the ‘artificiality’ of Milton and Dryden. The rupture is explicitly a psychological failure, ‘something which had happened to the mind of England’. Eliot’s call for a reunification of thought and feeling recalls Vittoz’s distinction between passive awareness and a felt consciousness in the individual

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mind: ‘Avoir conscience d’un acte, ce n’est pas le penser, mais le sentir’ (‘To be conscious of an act, is not to think it, but to feel it’). Eliot’s prescribed cure is grounded in the language and processes of depth psychology. What was missing, he wrote, was the guiding presence found in French literature, of Racine in the seventeenth century, and of Baudelaire in the nineteenth. These ‘greatest two masters of diction are also the greatest two psychologists, the most curious explorers of the soul.’ Eliot rejected the advice of those who . . . tell us to ‘look into our hearts and write’ . . . that is not looking deep enough; Racine or Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.

The cerebral cortex (the outer layer of the brain) is key to memory, perceptual awareness, thought, language, and consciousness. The nervous system and digestive tracts feature in Vittoz’s book as the particular areas where psychological symptoms are physiologically manifest (the autonomic nervous system functions below the level of consciousness, controlling visceral functions including digestion). In order to heal the rupture of dissociation, the English poet must move beyond the heart’s easily apprehensible emotion, and look to the psyche. To find ‘les mots pour le dire’ (the words to say), the Expressivist poet must transfigure into language the signs thrown up in vision by the unconscious. This necessary confrontation with the submerged elements of the psyche requires of the poet an acknowledgement of the cognitive dissonance between language and feeling, before a reunification through becoming ‘more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning’. Confrontation and dislocation are by their nature painful processes. Eliot displayed great interest in the possibilities of abnormal (even pathological) states of consciousness stripping away illusory reality and granting access to subterranean energies. In an essay on Bergson, he asks, ‘Where, again, is the reality, in the consciousness, or in that which is perceived? Where is the one reality to subsume both of these, and can we or can we not know it?’ His graduate papers reveal that he ‘defended the relative ontological status of mental phenomena such as hallucinations and illusions’, even as he related mystic visions to physical infirmity. Manju Jain posits that Eliot’s wide student reading across the related fields of psychology, philosophy, and mysticism equipped him the better to explore the ‘subterranean reaches of the self.’ In ‘The Pensées of Pascal’ (),

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His Dark Materials

Eliot remarks that ‘it is a commonplace that some forms of illness are extremely favourable, not only to religious illumination, but to artistic and literary composition’. In  Eliot commissioned Virginia Woolf to write an essay on illness, published as ‘On Being Ill’ in the January  Criterion. Although Woolf felt that Eliot was unreceptive to the essay, it reveals a shared sense of the mystical and transformative dimensions of disease (perhaps Eliot’s emerged later – most of his critical writing on illness post-dates Woolf’s essay). Woolf wrote in her diary, ‘I believe these illnesses are in my case . . . partly mystical. Something happens in my mind’, and spoke of ‘that odd amphibious life of headache’. ‘On Being Ill’ is preoccupied with getting beneath superficies to realms of experience made possible by illness. In illness, we are more receptive to words, we grasp what is beyond their surface meaning . . . In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness . . . we creep beneath some obscure poems by Mallarmé or Donne . . . and the words give out their scent . . . 

Woolf’s sensual, invalid language of drugs with ‘moths’ eyes and . . . feathered feet’ is looser than Eliot’s contemporaneous poetry of metaphysical affliction (‘the anguish of the marrow / The ague of the skeleton; / . . . the fever of the bone’), yet each explicitly relates a distinct and valuable form of writing to the altered perception and psychological experience of physical illness. Woolf describes the alteration that attends upon illness: other tastes assert themselves; sudden, fitful, intense. We rifle the poets of their flowers. We break off a line or two and let them open in the depths of the mind, spread their bright wings, swim like coloured fish in green waters.

Eliot echoes Woolf’s phrase in ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, where he describes Coleridge’s moments of inspiration in similarly pathological terms as ‘sudden, fitful and terrifying’ (UP ). In the fourth section of ‘East Coker’, illness is the precondition for reconstruction (‘Our only health is the disease . . . to be restored, our sickness must grow worse’) (P ). The passage recalls Eliot’s  Poems in its stretching of the medical metaphor across a global, metaphysical frame (‘Adam’s curse’), but its evocation of the experience of illness owes more to the creeping entrancements evident in Woolf’s prose. Eliot’s lines The chill ascends from feet to knees, The fever sings in mental wires.

(P )

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link to the ‘trilling wire in the blood’, which ‘[s]ings below inveterate scars’ in the symbolist second section of ‘Burnt Norton’, beginning a visionary ascent touching upon ‘the figured leaf’ and ‘the drift of stars’ (P ). The recurrence of ‘sings’ also speaks to the linkage between illness and musical madness, as in ‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’ (‘to hear my Madness singing’), which Ricks connects to both Lear (‘As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud’) and Arnaut Daniel in Dante’s Purgatorio XXVI, lines – (‘I am Arnold, who weeps and goes singing’). In his Norton Lectures Eliot meditates at length on the linkage between illness and creativity, writing that some forms of ill-health, debility or anaemia, may . . . produce an efflux of poetry in a way approaching the condition of automatic writing . . . To me it seems that at these moments, which are characterized by the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear which presses upon our daily life so steadily that we are unaware of it, what happens is something negative: that is to say, not ‘inspiration’ as we commonly think of it, but the breaking down of strong habitual barriers – which tend to reform very quickly. (UP )

The breakdown of ‘habitual barriers’ represents the momentary reunification of the split and doubled selves. The individual is temporarily reconstituted, able to ‘produce an efflux’ of the material that more usually stays submerged, ‘incubating’ in the deep. Although embedded in discussions of mystical experience, Eliot’s references to creative illness appear against the historical backdrop of Jung’s – period of psychic crisis, as well as Freud’s corresponding neurasthenia. The neurotic breakdowns suffered by both psychologists between the ages of thirty-eight and forty-three preceded Eliot’s remarks on creative illness, were well documented, and led in each case to the development and promulgation of an original and highly influential theory (Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in  and Jung’s Psychological Types in ). During Jung’s illness, he attempted to force a confrontation with what he called his ‘No.  personality’, writing that ‘I knew that No.  was the light, and No.  followed him like a shadow.’ Eliot instinctively makes use of the language of psychological light and shadow in his famous remarks on Hamlet, a play he found disquieting because of his sense that Hamlet ‘is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.’ Jarringly, in the same passage, Eliot describes Coriolanus (together with, more understandably, Othello and Anthony and Cleopatra) as contrastingly ‘intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight’. As in Eliot’s reference to the ‘Abyss’ into which the desert

His Dark Materials



sages peered (a reference picked up again in the Norton Lectures, as we have seen), Jung characterises his confrontation as a descent, comparing it to Odysseus’s journey to receive the speech of the dead in the underworld: In order to seize hold of the fantasies, I frequently imagined a steep descent. I even made several attempts to get to the very bottom. The first time I reached, as it were, a depth of about a thousand feet; the next time I found myself at the edge of a cosmic abyss. It was like a voyage to the moon, or a descent into empty space. First came the image of a crater, and I had the feeling that I was in the land of the dead. The atmosphere was that of the other world.

Jung elides his shadow-self with the shades of the underworld, his identification rendering them a mythic paradox, the living dead: ‘One fantasy kept returning: there was something dead present, but it was also still alive.’ Eliot coined the term ‘auditory imagination’ to describe what is, in effect, a poetic rendering of the internal descent of depth psychology: the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. (UP –)

The sense that a penetration of one’s own psychic substrata will yield up an archetypal rhythm and reality is equally apparent in Eliot’s remarks on Yeats’s poetic development. Eliot suggests that in later life the older poet achieved a universality born of self-recognition and reunification: ‘something is coming through, and in beginning to speak as a particular man, he is beginning to speak for man’. Notes  Kermode, ‘Eliot and the Shudder’, –.  ‘Critical Note to The Collected Poems of Harold Monro, ed. Alida Monro, with a biographical sketch by F. S. Flint’ (), Prose IV, p. .  ‘Introduction to The Wheel of Fire’, Prose IV, p. .  ‘Yeats’, OPP, p. .  ‘A Commentary (Apr. )’, Prose IV, p. .  ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death’s Jest-Book; or, The Fool’s Tragedy (London, ), p. .  ‘The Music of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  Ibid., pp. , .  ‘Introduction’, in The Art of Poetry, p. xxi.  ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, OPP, p. .



Gestation and Resurrection

 Ibid., p. .  Paradise Lost, II.–.  Genesis :–. Comparing ‘Jacob and the Angel’ with Hamlet, A. D. Nuttall notes that ‘the Bible itself seems to say what tradition dare not repeat: that Jacob wrestled with God.’ A. D. Nuttall, ‘Hamlet: Conversations with the Dead’, in The Stoic in Love: Selected Essays on Literature and Ideas (Hemel Hempstead, ), p. .  ‘A Prediction in Regard to Three English Authors’, Prose II, p. .  Compare with the reference, in ‘East Coker’, to the entwined agonies of death and birth (P ).  John Xiros Cooper, T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets (Cambridge, ), p. .  See E. Martin Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays (; Cambridge, ), p. .  ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, OPP, pp. , , , .  Compare The Confidential Clerk: ‘That state of utter exhaustion and peace / Which comes in dying to give something life . . .’ (CPP ); Eliot’s autobiographical description of ‘that excitement, that joyful loss of self in the workmanship of art, that intense and transitory relief which comes at the moment of completion’ (‘Matthew Arnold’ (), Prose IV, p. ); and Christ’s final words, dying as he gives life: ‘it is consummated’ (‘consummatum est’). John :.  See Wayne Koestenbaum, ‘The Waste Land: T. S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s Collaboration on Hysteria’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (New York, ), pp. –.  Eliot sent a page torn out of the Midwives Gazette in response to Conrad Aiken’s praise for Eliot’s Poems (). Conrad Aiken, Ushant: An Essay (London, ), p. .  SV, I, p. .  See C. K. Stead, The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (London, ), pp. –; and Daniel O’Hara, ‘“The Unsummoned Image”: T. S. Eliot’s Unclassic Criticism’, boundary  / (), –.  Miller, Doubles, p. vi.  Ibid., pp. , .  H. Porter Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (Ithaca, ), p. .  On Being Ill, ed. Hermione Lee (Ashfield, ), p. .   Nov. , Letters I, p. .  See Letters , p. ; and Roger Vittoz, Treatment of Neurasthenia by Teaching of Brain Control, trans. H. B. Brooke (London, ), p. .  ‘Depth psychology’ is a blanket term denoting psychology preoccupied with unconscious or subconscious processes, including Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian psychology, and Adlerian individual psychology.  Stevens, Jung, p. .  Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, p. .

His Dark Materials



 See also Pierre Janet, ‘Double Personalities’, in The Major Symptoms of Hysteria (New York, ), pp. –.  Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry (New York, ), p. .  ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’, Prose II, p. .  C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (; London, ), p. : ‘Complexes are psychic fragments which have split off owing to traumatic influences or certain incompatible tendencies . . . complexes behave like independent beings . . . In the voices heard by the insane they even take on a personal ego-character like . . . the spirits who manifest themselves through automatic writing’. Freud spoke of the Oedipus and Electra complexes, but did not structure his theories around the term, as Jung did.   Feb. , Letters I, pp. –. As Ricks records, in a variant of the poem the lines run ‘Holding her breath lest she begin to think. / I was a shadow upright in the corner’. Grover Smith praises the poem’s ‘clinical verisimilitude’ in rendering the symptoms of ‘hysteria in sleep’. ‘T. S. Eliot and the Fragmented Selves: From “Suppressed Complex” to Sweeney Agonistes’, Philological Quarterly / (Sep. ), , , .  Crawford, Savage and the City, p. .  Smith, ‘T. S. Eliot and the Fragmented Selves’, p. .  Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (Oxford, ), p. .  The epigraph is from Virgil. Aeneas speaks these words to a young girl (his mother Venus in disguise).  ‘Introductory Essay to London: A Poem and the Vanity of Human Wishes by Samuel Johnson’ (), Prose IV, p. .  ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, OPP, p. .  Harry Trosman, ‘T. S. Eliot and The Waste Land: Psychopathological Antecedents and Transformations’, Archives of General Psychiatry / (), ; Schimmel quotes Trosman with approval: Paul Schimmel, ‘“In My End Is My Beginning”: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and After’, British Journal of Psychotherapy / (), . Written nearly thirty years apart, these studies demonstrate the enduring interest of Eliot’s poetry for psychologists.  See J. L. Henderson, ‘Stages of Psychological Development Exemplified in the Poetical Works of T. S. Eliot’, The Journal of Analytical Psychology / (), –; J. L. Henderson, ‘Stages of Psychological Development Exemplified in the Poetical Works of T. S. Eliot (Continued)’, The Journal of Analytical Psychology / (), –; and Harry Trosman, ‘After The Waste Land: Psychological Factors in the Religious Conversion of T. S. Eliot’, International Review of Psycho-Analysis  (), –.  ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, OPP, pp. –.  Nuttall, ‘Hamlet: Conversations with the Dead’, p. .  Antony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, ), p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Smith, ‘T. S. Eliot and the Fragmented Selves’, p. .



Gestation and Resurrection

 ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, OPP, p. . ‘Entelechy’ – ‘the condition in which a potentiality has become an actuality’, ‘the informing spirit’. OED.  The first instalment of Schnitzler’s ‘Doctor Graesler’ appeared in the same edition as Eliot’s ‘London Letter’ (Dial / (Jul. ), –, –). The September issue included Eliot’s ‘London Letter’ and a further instalment of ‘Doctor Graesler’ (Dial / (Sep. ), –, –), as well as a critical essay on Schnitzler’s work: Richard Specht, ‘Arthur Schnitzler’, trans. Kenneth Burke, Dial / (Sep. ), –.  Arthur Schnitzler, ‘Doctor Graesler’, Dial / (Nov. ), –; T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, Ibid., –.  Leon Edel, ‘Psychoanalysis and the “Creative” Arts’, in J. Marmor (ed.), Modern Psychoanalysis: New Directions and Perspectives (New Brunswick, ), p. .  ‘To Walter de la Mare’, P .  ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth: A Review of Ulysses, by James Joyce’ (), Prose II, p. .  Crawford, Savage and the City, p. .  Conrad Aiken, ‘King Bolo and Others’, in Richard March and Tambimuttu (eds.), T. S. Eliot: A Symposium (New York, ), p. .  C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, in ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, The Collected Works, vol.  (London, ), p. .  ‘[W]hereas the mythological figures appear as pale phantoms and relics of a long past age which has become strange to us, the religious statement represents an immediate “numinous” experience. It is a living mythologem.’ Jung, ‘Introduction’, in Victor White, God and the Unconscious (; Chicago, ), p. xiv.  ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, OPP, p. .   Oct. , Letters I, pp. –.  Roger Vittoz, Traitment des Psychonévroses par la Rééducation du Contrôle Cerebral (Paris, ).  Matthew K. Gold, ‘The Expert Hand and the Obedient Heart: Dr. Vittoz, T. S. Eliot, and the Therapeutic Possibilities of “The Waste Land”’, Journal of Modern Literature /– (summer ), .  Letters I, pp. –.  Vittoz, Neurasthenia, pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (London, ), p. ; Adam Piette, ‘Eliot’s Breakdown and Dr. Vittoz’, English Language Notes  (), –; and Gold, ‘The Expert Hand’, –.  Vittoz, Neurasthenia, p. vii. The terminology has been superseded.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (London, ), p. .

His Dark Materials



 Vittoz, Neurasthenia, pp. , , . Compare The Family Reunion: ‘You have gone through life in sleep, / Never woken to the nightmare. I tell you, life would be unendurable / If you were wide awake’ (CPP ).  Compare I. A. Richards’s definition of imagination, incorporating Coleridge’s ‘balance and reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’ into a psychological and aesthetic ‘equilibrium’ of ‘opposed’ ‘impulses’: Principles of Literary Criticism (; London, ), pp. –. Charles Sherrington’s – Gifford Lectures extrapolate a natural theology from biological science, describing cellular physiology as ‘a dynamic equilibrium’ and quoting Coleridge’s definition of ‘life as the principle of Individuation, or the power that unites a given all into a whole which is presupposed by all its parts’. Man on His Nature, pp. , .  Trosman, ‘T. S. Eliot and The Waste Land’, .  Piette, ‘Eliot’s Breakdown and Dr. Vittoz’, .  Vittoz, Neurasthenia, pp. –.  Gold, ‘The Expert Hand’, .  See Vittoz, Neurasthenia, pp. –.  See C. G. Jung, The Essential Jung: Selected Writings, ed. Anthony Storr (London, ), pp. –.  Vittoz, Neurasthenia, pp. , .  Vittoz, Neurasthenia, p. .  Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. , –.  Harris, ‘Mental Hygiene’, .  David R. Russell, Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History (Carbondale, ), p. .  Harris, ‘Mental Hygiene’, –.  ‘Address by T. S. Eliot, ’, to the Class of ’, June , ’ (), Prose IV, p. . First published in the Milton Graduates Bulletin / (Nov. ), . (hereafter ‘Milton Academy Address’).  Roger Vittoz, Notes et Pensées – Angoisse ou Contrôle (Paris, ), p. .  See also Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, p. .  Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol.  (–), ed. Anne O. Bell (London, ), p .  Smith, ‘T. S. Eliot and the Fragmented Selves’, p. .  ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Prose II, p. .  Vittoz, Neurasthenia, p. . See Gold, ‘The Expert Hand’, .  C. K. Stead, The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (London, ), p. .  ‘Burnt Norton’, P .  ‘Religion without Humanism’ (), Prose IV, p. .  See Paul Murray, T. S. Eliot and Mysticism: The Secret History of Four Quartets (Basingstoke, ), pp. –.  Gardner, Composition of Four Quartets, p. .   Dec. . John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings and introduction by John Mee (Oxford, ), p. .  ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, Prose II, p. .

    

                       

Gestation and Resurrection ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Prose II, p. . Ibid. James, ‘Introduction to The Tempest’, p. . Eliot wrote to Richard Aldington,  Sep. , mentioning that he had ‘just finished an article’ on the metaphysical poets. He wrote to Julian Huxley,  Oct. , noting that Ottoline Morrell had previously ‘strongly advised’ him to see Dr. Vittoz. Letters I, pp. , . ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, Prose II, pp. , , , . Vittoz, Notes et Pensées, p. . ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, Prose II, p. . Vittoz, Neurasthenia, p. . ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, Prose II, p. . See Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London, ), p. . Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’, –. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol.  (–), ed. Anne O. Bell (London, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Woolf On Being Ill, . Ibid., . ‘Whispers of Immortality’, P . Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’, . Inventions of the March Hare, p. . Stevens, Jung, p. . Ibid., p. . Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. . ‘Hamlet’, Prose II, p. . Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. . Ibid., p. . ‘Yeats’ (), OPP, p. .

 

Dark Doubles

‘This ghost, this pendulum in the head’

Who is it that can tell me who I am?

– Shakespeare, King Lear, I.iv.

The splitting or doubling of personality was a well-established literary trope even in antiquity, bound together with theories of artistic (and even magical) creation. Although an account exists of John Donne encountering a spectre of his living wife in , it was in the nineteenth century that literary reports of the phenomenon became widespread. Goethe and Shelley documented visionary encounters with their spectral other selves. For Guy de Maupassant, the doppelgänger was the sine qua non of his literary production, dictating his writings to him. Doubles feature in works by Dostoevsky, Stephenson, Kafka, Poe, Hogg, and Wilde. In a foundational poem by Heine, ‘Still ist die Nacht’ () – set to music by Schubert as Der Doppelgänger in  – the speaker accosts a solitary figure in the moonlight, only to discover his own features, wracked with grief for the loss of a beloved: There stands a figure staring up at the heights, He wrings his hands, shrouded in torment: I shudder, when I see his face, My own countenance figured in the moonlight. You Doppelgänger! pale replicant! Why do you ape the pain of my heart, Which harrowed me in this place, So many nights, in another time? 

Tennyson’s In Memoriam () depicts a deathly adjuvant, encountered at both ends of the vertical spectrum of human awareness: What find I in the highest place, But mine own phantom chanting hymns? And on the depths of death there swims The reflex of a human face. 



Gestation and Resurrection

This allusive attenuation of the self allows a dynamic relationship with the dead. In  Joseph Conrad wrote of ‘the duality of man’s nature’ in the context of his belief that art ‘is evocation of the unseen . . . the subtle presence of the dead is felt in that silence that comes upon the artistcreation when the last word has been read.’ As Karl Miller writes, the ‘romantic literature of duality’ that appeared in the later eighteenth century gave an ‘unexpired currency’ to the subject ‘which can be located in the common speech and common knowledge, and in the literature, of the present time.’ Although he situates ‘duality’s heyday’ in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, ‘the subject has by no means been dropped.’ The doubled self ‘sees a resurgence in the early twentieth century as a corollary of psychoanalytic theories of the split ego.’ Marina Warner argues that the theme of duality ‘is intertwined with technologies of reproduction, first optical, then, increasingly, biological.’ She suggests that in the nineteenth century, audiovisual means of reproduction and memorialisation (such as the camera obscura, the magic lantern, the phonograph, and ultimately the cinema) fed into and fused with Romantic anxieties concerning the instability, loss, or diffusion of personhood: The double . . . solicits hopes and dreams . . . of a possible becoming different while remaining the same person, of escaping the bounds of self, of aspiring to the polymorphous perversity of infants, in Freud’s phrase, which in some ways mimics the protean energies of the metamorphic gods.

The dark double may be formed by means of foreign colonisation or daemonic possession, or may issue from the ‘unconscious promptings and concealed desires’ of the subconscious – ‘unruly, unbidden, disobedient selves’ generated from within. In , Eliot described his impulse to poetic composition as an ‘embryo’ in ‘the unconscious mind’: ‘in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing’. In his description of the ‘gestation of the poem’, the ‘inert embryo’ is juxtaposed against a demonic figure – the unformed child and the unwinged angel, the one swaddled, the other swathed, in darkness. The embryo is inert because unidentified, as in ‘Gerontion’, where it is portentous yet dumb, ‘unable to speak a word’. Once it begins to take shape in words, it becomes ‘the octopus or angel with which the poet struggles’. Eliot’s  essay returns to the terms of an earlier piece, Eliot’s introduction to The Collected Poems of Harold Monro ().

Dark Doubles



Discussing Harold Monro in terms perhaps also applicable to himself, Eliot described the spectres and the ‘bad dreams’ which live inside the skull . . . the ceaseless question and answer of the tortured mind . . . The external world . . . is manifestly but the mirror of a darker world within . . . 

He argued that Monro’s creative originality was determined not by the idea – for there is no idea – but by the nature of that dark embryo within him which gradually takes on the form and speech of a poem.

C. K. Stead and Ronald Schuchard have both explored Eliot’s dark embryo, albeit in different guises. Stead’s The New Poetic () argues for a re-evaluation of poetry in Britain at the turn of the century, asserting the centrality of Yeats and repositioning Eliot as the inheritor of Romantic ‘inspiration’. Stead observes in Eliot’s criticism the gradual realisation of a poetic technique that brought the rational mind into harmony with ‘that passive part of the mind which . . . negatively comprehends complexity, and provides images to embody it’. Schuchard adopts instead the figure of the ‘dark angel’, drawing on the eponymous poem by Lionel Johnson and arguing that Eliot inherited his dark angel from the doomed s generation of poets that included Johnson, Ernest Dowson, and James Thomson (Crawford also finds in these three poets the antecedents of Eliot’s savage urban landscape). To Schuchard, this dark figure is a ‘shadow’ of intense spiritual horror and sexual disturbance, blighting the poet’s life. As his adoption of the shadow image suggests, the embryo is progressively externalised in Schuchard’s analysis, as the shadow of Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne. Schuchard’s biographical focus equates the shadow with the macula – the stain of sin (he looks to the ‘sexual betrayal’ in Eliot’s first marriage as ‘the most imperious voice’ in The Waste Land ). Stead conceptualises the dark embryo as the psychic embodiment of the ‘negative capability’ to apprehend contradiction. Down-playing the image’s darker aspects, Stead suggests that ‘saturation of the poet’s sensibility in the vats of tradition and orthodoxy ensures a healthy “embryo” and a healthy poem’. But the image is more than a symbolic acknowledgement of a necessary feature of the artist’s psyche, imagined in productive interplay with tradition and orthodoxy. For Eliot, the embryo is a Cimmerian presence, utterly alien to the conventional sentimental language of literary midwifery. It has more in common with the Romantic



Gestation and Resurrection

notion (as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) of the child as the ungodly offspring of a diseased mind. Eliot’s association of the image with Monro (who suffered from depressive illness and drank himself to death) makes clear that the embryo’s darkness extends beyond gestational obscurity into the realms of compulsion, hysteria, and disease. It is an unwelcome emanation of the deep self in Eliot’s bifurcated poetic consciousness, demanding what Anthony Cuda calls ‘Eliot’s insistent attention to the mind’s inscrutable periphery’. It embraces the most fundamental elements of personhood, painfully transmuted into a primal form in which the poet may experience a submersion in the creative element without risking destruction. The dark embryo is integral to the process of composition, and the spark and substance of the poetry itself. This may be why Eliot’s description of the auditory imagination – ‘the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end’ (UP –) – echoes through his poetry. Ricks finds an auditory connection between Eliot’s critical description of the auditory imagination (‘penetrating’, ‘invigorating’, ‘sinking’, ‘returning’, ‘bringing’, ‘seeking’) and the opening of The Waste Land, where the present participles form a repeated ‘non-temporal pause’ at the line endings: April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers.

(P )

The repetition of verbs in their progressive aspect expresses the dynamic (if stifled) quality of the process. ‘Breeding’ is at first finely balanced between the animal and the agricultural, but becomes retrospectively inflected by the later ‘stirring / Dull roots’, which evokes a Lawrentian stirring in the loins and the stirring of life within the womb. There is a thematic, rather than syntactic, symmetry between this part of ‘The Burial of the Dead’ and Mary’s speech in The Family Reunion, in which the Spring (an ‘evil’ season) has, in a phrase later excised from the scene, ‘exasperated [the ground] with subterranean movement’:



Dark Doubles The cold spring is now the time For the ache in the moving root The agony in the dark The slow flow throbbing the trunk The pain of the breaking bud.

(CPP )

The stir of ‘dull roots’ in The Waste Land becomes ‘the ache in the moving root’ that precedes ‘the agony in the dark’ and ‘the pain of the breaking bud’. The earth-boundedness of ’s dried tubers is transmuted into the ‘slow flow throbbing the trunk’, which is in turn related to the ‘slow flow heat is silence’ of the river in ‘Virginia’ (P ). The vernal is, inherently, also the placental, in these passages. The foetal consciousness, bounded by a heartbeat echoing through its dim, cavernous world, is the unseeing repository of the auditory imagination and a latent incarnation of the fructifying dead. The embryonic and the amniotic are necessarily intertwined. Contrary to David Moody’s suggestion that Eliot saw the ocean primarily as an expression of his own innate nihilism, Eliot was deeply drawn to the sea in its amniotic aspect. Describing ‘the idea of a submarine world of clear green light’ to Conrad Aiken in , Eliot imagined being umbilically ‘attached to a rock and swayed in two directions’ and wondered ‘would one be happiest or most wretched at the turn of the tide?’ The embryo suspended in the submarine world, yet subject to the pull of the tides, embodies the dualities of the poet’s psyche; it is an image of rootedness and immersion within a primordial element, like Eliot’s epistolary image of the diver retrieving unseen creatures from the deep. The poet, in guise of the embryo, is protected from the annihilatory boundlessness of the ocean by amniotic containment and umbilical attachment. Throughout these musings, Eliot maintains the foreignness that pervades the dark embryo, the sense of its originating in ‘the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer’ (UP ). The unknown, alien element carries with it fears of invasion and colonisation. The Waste Land ’s ‘blood shaking my heart’ is a phrase that delicately strums such fears – the blood that acts upon and disrupts the heart is a force unto itself, no longer wholly integrated into the physical being of the speaker. There is something inherently parasitic about the dark embryo, its flushed, burgeoning mass sustained by steady streams of cord blood from the poet’s psyche. Its vascular pull is evident in Eliot’s essay on Ben Jonson, which describes the power of Shakespeare’s characters as ‘the offspring of deeper, less apprehensible feelings’ drawing on ‘a network of tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires’.



Gestation and Resurrection

But what becomes of the doubled figure when the upper being becomes separated from the lifeblood in the rootstock? What terrible spectre is then made manifest? The answer appears in the mental landscape of The Hollow Men, where inchoate ghosts assail the conscious mind. These partial spectres do not result from any fertile psychic mitosis (cell division), but from a catastrophic bifurcation – a rupture between the substance of the animus and its outer husk: they are hollowed out, ‘headpiece filled with straw’ (P ). Eliot’s interest in the glimpses of the eternal open to the living was linked to his horror of the opposite phenomenon, the body that endures beyond the soul, embalmed – like the Sibyl – by the terrible knowledge of its own paralysis. Gordon detects in Eliot’s biography a consistent fear of such ‘death-in-life’ engendered by the meaninglessly rarefied rituals of the ‘round of Boston tea parties’ and the ‘London work-routines’. In the early poetry, a cultivated palimpsest of personality imposes the wraiths of decadent modernity over the undecayed ghosts of the sublimated past. The mind’s scrambled ability to give form to buried thoughts appears in typically neurotic form in ‘Prufrock’ as the ‘magic lantern’, which throws ‘the nerves in patterns on a screen’. The misdirections of the ‘cunning passages’ and ‘contrived corridors’ of ‘Gerontion’ reveal the atrophied confusions of a ‘dry brain’ attempting in vain to console itself for its losses. The third of Eliot’s ‘Preludes’ () depicts a figure who . . . dozed, and watched the night revealing The thousand sordid images Of which your soul was constituted . . .

(P )

The shattered urban soul perceives the images, but cannot make sense of them. They remain mere distracting hallucinations; the ‘fuel in vacant lots’ of the fourth ‘Prelude’. Smith finds ‘neither soul nor “conscience”’ in this figure, a mere ‘register upon which the images have impinged as upon a tabula rasa.’ An untitled  poem (‘Oh little voices of the throats of men’) goes further, conjuring an evacuated world, prey to colonising shadows: Across the floor the shadows crawled and crept And as the thin light shivered through the trees Around the muffled form they danced and leapt. They crawled about his shoulders and his knees; They rested for a moment on his hair Until the morning drove them to their lair.

(P )



Dark Doubles

Ricks connects this poem with Harry’s realisation (in The Family Reunion) of the Eumenides’ presence: ‘Do you feel a kind of stirring underneath the air?’ A further echo sounds in Harry’s reference to ‘the sobbing in the chimney / The evil in the dark closet’ (CPP ). Paralysed by his sense of vacuity, the muffled figure succumbs to the seductions of a creeping, selfreflexive evil. ‘Animula’ () provides a stark image of a soul being splintered into self-shadowing shades. Taking its opening from Dante, ‘the simple soul’ enters the world unencumbered by the complexities of reality and appearance, able to perceive elementary forms (‘light, dark, dry or damp’), and taking primitive ‘pleasure in the wind, the sunlight and the sea’. As the soul acquires sophistication its vision is clouded by bloodless ghosts until it becomes a ‘Shadow of its own shadows, spectre in its own gloom’. Its denial of the ‘importunity of the blood’ can be read as a rejection of the pressing necessity of the subterranean life, its absence a blight relieved only when the soul is reordered, ‘after the viaticum’. The spectre is trapped, ‘unable to fare forward, or retreat’ (P ). The inability to voyage onwards is a recurrent motif in The Hollow Men (), where spectres cling together in silent desperation on the river’s edge unable to reach the farther shore, and lines break, only to be repeated as inchoate echoes of themselves. It reappears as a leitmotif in ‘The Dry Salvages’ (‘Fare forward, travellers! . . . Fare forward . . .’). The frustrated, uncompleted hope that there might be something more, further on (or down), appears in Eliot’s ‘Coriolan’ (), where the repetition of ‘hidden’ amounts to a piteous plea for completion: O hidden under the dove’s wing, hidden in the turtle’s breast, Under the palmtree at noon, under the running water At the still point of the turning world. O hidden. ... O hidden under the . . . Hidden under the . . .

(P , )

The ellipses in the final line are instances of aposiopesis (sudden and unexpected breaks in a sentence), what Corcoran calls ‘a kind of neurotic stammer’. These gaps or sunderings are, as Corcoran suggests, more than ‘a rhetorical device in a poem which refuses to continue’ (it was collected by its author under the heading ‘Unfinished Poems’), and ‘may be unfinished because it handles material that remained unfinished business for Eliot himself, material that this poet could not manipulate any further into art.’



Gestation and Resurrection

The cluster of poetic fragments that evolved into The Hollow Men – some of which were first published under the title ‘Doris’s Dream Songs’ – is preoccupied with the boundary states between life and death, waking and sleeping (‘death’s dream kingdom’, ‘death’s twilight kingdom’, and ‘death’s other kingdom’), occupied by those unable to fare forwards or back, as well as visionary confrontation (‘Eyes I dare not meet in dreams’). A poem published pseudonymously in the spring  edition of Tyro, ‘Song to the Opherian’, contains the lines: This thought this ghost this pendulum in the head Swinging from life to death Bleeding between two lives 

The poem’s dream-consciousness gazes across a primordial Styx, a ‘blackened river’. The underworld symbolism (manifest in the presumably Orphic lyre of the poem’s original title), combined later with the spears and campfire iconography of a primitive encounter, suggest a regression into the self that draws on the symbolic tropes of depth psychology in a failed attempt at reintegration. The division between ‘the Shadow’ and its underlying reality has been explored by Marc Manganaro in relation to The Hollow Men, which he argues is drawn from a case study by Lucien Lévy-Brühl. In Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (), Lévy-Brühl describes a West African belief in bi-fold spirit realms, to which different halves of the soul are consigned. The kra is a ‘life spirit’, the immortal element of the soul, which wanders the physical world until it is incarnated in successive bodies. The srahman can be most readily imagined as the ghost of the physical body; it emerges when the body dies and thereafter exists in a separate realm, ‘Dead-land’, ‘a lifeless duplicate of the real, living world, whose “mountains, forests and rivers are . . . the ghosts of similar natural features which formerly existed in the world”’. Manganaro argues convincingly that this schema is reproduced in The Hollow Men, where the titular figures exist in a ‘dead land’, ‘the landscape of modernity . . . which is desolate because the culture which peoples it has forgotten or repealed the law of participation that unites the physical with the spiritual’. Eliot portrays those without internalised vision as ‘sightless’ demi-human rinds. Dispossessed of the terrible directness of the eyes of the soul (‘Eyes I dare not meet in dreams’), the hollow men intone, ‘The eyes are not here / There are no eyes here’ (P , ). There is no doubt that Eliot employed the cactus imagery of desert landscapes as an imaginative shorthand for spiritual thirst and



Dark Doubles

psychological desiccation (as per the ‘dry brain’ in ‘Gerontion’). Stephen Spender relates that Eliot ‘hated desert wastes, stretches of sand, cacti . . . impenetrably black nights, suffocating heat, scrub . . . [and] ticking insects’ and ‘dreaded’ the enforced winter vacations in North Africa and Barbados (he suffered from emphysema in later life), – although a series of images taken of the sexagenarian Eliot on honeymoon in the Bahamas in  rather gives the lie to Spender’s description of a lifelong antipathy to sand. Yet a horror of aridity is clearly evident in The Waste Land, with its . . . heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water . . .

(P )

In this place of ‘rock and no water’ on ‘the sandy road’, the desiccating air that divorces suffering from sense (‘Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think’) appears without the specifically anthropological underpinnings of Lévy-Brühl’s ‘dead land’ mythology (P ). The stuffed straw men of Eliot’s poetry are relatable to a broader literary and psychological topos of ersatz life – the undead, or living dead – suspended between dissolution and resuscitation. The July  edition of the Criterion includes a laudatory review by Alan Porter of Jung’s writings on analytical psychology (including his  essay ‘On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetic Art’), which serves to emphasise the affinities between The Hollow Men and Jungian symbolism. The review vividly describes Jung’s psychology as ‘a vision of Death-in-Life and Life-in-Death’, and discusses ‘the root dualism’ of the Jungian system, ‘a complex and subtilized dualism, in which each opposite contains its other’: We see it in his conception of the split libido; as if the very process of life consisted of two opposite and equal movements . . . The country of dead men? It is the collective unconscious. Here is the tissue of man, in his body and grave, the whole infinity of his past persists. I am not merely I; I am my family, my stock, my nation, my race; man, primate, and mammal; reptile and fish; plantain, cabbage, and tree; protoplasm and central fire of life. They co-exist in me; they clamour for their present life in me. I am not man alone, since man is the consciousness of personality, and behind that consciousness the whole of evolution, the whole of history, lives in every individual, working towards the future.

In Alan Porter’s Jungian vision, the fragments of individual and collective identities are layered together: the ‘tissue of man’ – dried to a whisper in



Gestation and Resurrection

the throats of the hollow men (‘wind in dry grass . . . rats’ feet over broken glass’) – is given voice to clamour for its present life within the psyche. The cross-currents of life and death, what Eliot called ‘the contact and crosscontact of souls,’ their ‘breath and scent’, are here articulated in the common language of Eliot and Jung. Porter explains the Jungian project as one in which the individual, ‘whether by conscious effort or by eruption . . . becomes a vehicle for the unconscious . . . adapts himself willingly and consciously, both to the contemporary world and to the still living past’. If this occurs, ‘the dead will be at peace; they will have their due fulfilment in the continuous present’. Expressed in these terms, Jungian reintegration effects the same continuity between the living and dead past as Eliot advocated in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. Stephen Spender wrote of Eliot that he understood the past as containing ‘forces still active and capable of being further activated, within the present’: He had a vision of the relationship of the living with the dead through the patterns of rituals that extend into the modern world the pieties that remain unaltered from the past. He thought that when these rituals were disrupted . . . there would be no connection of the living with the dead, of the present with the past.

In ‘Marina’, the poetic consciousness searches across a landscape of water and mist, able to make the journey to the farther shore denied to the hollow men. Those ghosts rendered fatally incomplete by sin are blown away by an elemental breath (psyche) that prefigures the cleansing wind that whirls about the trammelled souls in ‘Burnt Norton’. In ‘Marina’, the vacant ghosts are ‘dissolved’, their dissolution clearing the way for the revelation of a fertile stratum of the soul from which ‘images return’. Sight is replaced as the medium of experience and connection by the beating of the pulse. The poem explicitly picks up the moment of recognition and reintegration between Marina and Pericles (‘Have you a working pulse?’) (V.i.). The contours of the beloved face are felt within the soul’s pulse, ‘less clear and clearer . . . less strong and stronger . . . more distant than the stars and nearer than the eye’ (P ). The Four Quartets teem with many shadows, infant revenants, and spectral selves. Although the double may take many such forms, a pervasive version in Eliot’s writing is the ‘doppelgänger’. The term (from German, literally ‘double-goer’) first appeared at the turn of the eighteenth century, when Jean Paul Richter glossed it in a footnote to Siebenkäs () as ‘people

Dark Doubles



who see themselves’. The Oxford Companion to the Body notes ‘that there is uncertainty from the start as to whether the apparently original self or its alter ego is the double in question.’ Citing Emily Dickinson’s horror of ‘Ourself behind ourself, concealed’, Warner situates the doppelgänger as the central representative figure of this anxiety – a dark double who both is and is not the self. Eliot touches lightly on these anxieties and confusions in The Elder Statesman (); Lord Claverton (a man who knows something of metaphysical stage makeup and multiple identity) voices the ambiguous line: ‘I, who recognise myself as a ghost’ (CPP ). Doubles repeatedly present themselves in Eliot’s writing, as in the ‘compound ghost’ of ‘Little Gidding’ who – in a shadowing of old King Hamlet – ‘faded on the blowing of the horn’; and in the spectral ‘third who walks . . . beside’ of The Waste Land. As these instances suggest, the dark double is necessarily elusive and – in the case of Eliot’s poetry of allusion – necessarily insubstantial. In Marjorie Garber’s striking formulation, all allusion is faintly uncanny, poised between presence and absence: the use of quotation is itself always already doubled, already belated, since it cites a voice or opinion that gains force from being somehow absent, authority from the fact of being set apart . . . In the same way, a quotation is a ghost: a revenant taken out of context, making an unexpected, often disconcerting appearance.

In this formulation, the poetic spectres are summoned by acknowledgement of their absence. Eliot provides a dramatic rendering of this in The Family Reunion, when Harry’s sudden awareness of quiet (‘Why is it so quiet? / Do you feel a kind of stirring underneath the air?’) (CPP ) at least presages, but more likely invokes, the silent wraiths who then attend upon him. An awareness of the underside of literary allusion as invested with a ghostly significance is woven into Eliot’s poetry and prose, often linked obliquely with Henry James. In January  Eliot wrote to Herbert Read that he found Henry James especially difficult because to me he seems not wholly conscious. There is something bigger there, of which he is hardly aware, than ‘civilisation’ & its ‘complexities’ . . . which is perhaps why I like some of his poorer stuff better than his best; in his poorer stuff something bigger appears without his knowing it – e.g. I like especially ‘The Altar of the Dead’ & ‘The Friends of the Friends’.

Both ‘The Altar of the Dead’ () and ‘The Friends of the Friends’ (, originally published in  as ‘The Way It Came’) are stories of



Gestation and Resurrection

ghostly visitation and haunted recollection. Their themes mirror one another: ‘The Altar of the Dead’ arrives (however inconclusively) at a moment of forgiveness within the context of shared remembrance and veneration of the dead, while ‘The Friends of the Friends’ charts a ghostly supervention on an engagement that consequently withers, poisoning the relations between those still living. They articulate, in their own terms, the varieties of growth and stasis that shadow encounters between the self and its ghostly others. James may in fact have been more aware of the ‘something bigger’ than Eliot gives him credit for. ‘The Altar of the Dead’ seems to have crystallised around James’s own growing sense of isolated haunting by insistent but neglected spectres. Two years prior to its publication, he confessed to his brother: One feels, in this terribly hurrying age and roaring place, as if one were testifying in the desert . . . the waves sweep dreadfully over the dead – they drop out and their names are unuttered.

James himself sensed an obscured ghostly signification in the ‘undetermined figure’ of Shakespeare: ‘The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there, with its immensity of surface and its proportionate underside.’ Eliot echoes James in his essay ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’, where a poem’s rhythm is felt as a ‘ghost . . . behind the arras’. The presence behind the figured tapestry (a compound of the fathers, Old Hamlet and Polonius) is evoked again in ‘East Coker’. As the poetic voice looks to its beginning and its end, there is a time ‘to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto’ (P ). Eliot’s doppelgängers give a sustained tension to his meditations on the exhausted possibilities and liabilities of the past (and, possibly, of the future, as Corcoran finds in the line from ‘Little Gidding’ – ‘next year’s words await another voice’ – a ‘proleptic allusion’: ‘Having itself absorbed Dante, Shakespeare, Yeats and all the rest, it leaves a pregnant emptiness waiting to be filled, where someone else must “move in measure”’). The sense in ‘Little Gidding’ of ‘Knowing myself yet being someone other’ is an effect of the same ‘merciless clairvoyance’ Eliot had previously detected in Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw (). James was, for Eliot, a literary doppelgänger, divided in essence between putative selves. In another letter to Herbert Read written a year after the one quoted above, Eliot muses on the presence-in-absence of the exile or wanderer who is, explicitly, both James and himself: Some day I want to write an essay about the point of view of an American who wasn’t an American, because his America ended in ; and who

Dark Doubles



wasn’t a Yankee, because he was born in the South and went to school in New England . . . but who wasn’t a southerner in the South because his people were northerners in a border state and looked down on all southerners and Virginians, and who so was never anything anywhere and who therefore felt himself to be more of a Frenchman than an American and more of an Englishman than a Frenchman and yet felt that the U.S.A. up to a hundred years ago was a family extension. It is almost too difficult even for H.J. who for that matter, wasn’t an American at all, in that sense.

Such concerns were clearly playing on Eliot’s mind. In a contemporaneous preface to Edgar Ansel Mower’s This American World () Eliot writes with poignancy of his sense of bifurcated displacement through the frame of nostalgia for the twin Edens of his childhood landscapes: it was not until years of maturity that I perceived that I myself had always been a New Englander in the South West, and a South Westerner in New England; . . . In New England I missed the long dark river, the ailanthus trees, the flaming cardinal birds, the high limestone bluffs where we searched for fossil shell-fish; in Missouri I missed the fir trees, the bay and goldenrod, the song-sparrows, the red granite and the blue sea of Massachusetts.

Writing about Eliot as a metoikos (metic, resident alien) in London, Daniel Blanton perceptively suggests that ‘for Eliot, as for James, the metic recuperates a measure of lost experience by cultivating the unfamiliar.’ For both writers, such attempts at recuperation acquire an odour of the uncanny when the irrecoverable objects of nostalgic desire resolve into a vision of a lost or unrealised iteration of the self. Another of James’s supernatural stories, ‘The Jolly Corner’ (), concerns an expatriate returning to his native America who is forced to confront the spectre of a self who had never gone to Europe. This story, whose fictive biography so closely follows that of its author (and Eliot), flits like a shadow behind Eliot’s verse, particularly in his later, more ruminative writing of the s and s (Four Quartets and the plays). The spectral ‘they’ of ‘Burnt Norton’, half-encountered ‘through the first gate’, ‘invisible, / Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves’ (P ), mirror and reverse the familial presences in ‘The Jolly Corner’, where the prodigal son finds the heavy doors of the house suggestive of ‘the pressure of the palms of the dead’. The protagonist finds that words spoken by non-spectral conversants ring but lightly over ‘the queerest and deepest of his own lately most disguised and most muffled vibrations,’ prefiguring the ‘other echoes’ that ‘inhabit the garden’ of ‘Burnt Norton’. The ‘ash on an old man’s sleeve’ and dust suspended in the air of ‘Little Gidding’ recall the



Gestation and Resurrection

‘sudden in a shaft of sunlight’ that concludes ‘Burnt Norton’, but each of these moments of loss also combines the implacability of the crematorium with the transience and fluidity of sunlit motes, in a manner very close to James’s image of ‘impalpable ashes of his long-extinct youth, afloat in the very air like microscopic motes.’ The appearance in ‘the waning dusk’ of a stranger in ‘Little Gidding’ situates the encounter in the same lexical halflight as James’s ‘erect confronting presence’, faced ‘through the dusk’. In Eliot’s ‘To Walter de la Mare’ – another poem haunted by ‘unseen feet’ and long-gone children – ‘An empty face peers from an empty house’ (P –). What are rather striking affinities in these poems appear as direct echoes in The Family Reunion. Eliot makes what Edward Lobb calls ‘intriguing although tangential use’ of ‘The Jolly Corner’ (Lobb goes on to argue that the allusion is ‘one of the keys to the play’). Like James’s Spencer Brydon, Eliot’s Harry Piper returns to the site of his childhood. Each embodies in an alternate self an unrealised future, placed out of reach by choices irrevocably made. The play emphasises Harry’s doubleness, his simultaneous awareness that he is ‘living on several planes at once / Though one cannot speak with several voices at once’ (CPP ). (This, of course, is precisely what the ‘familiar compound ghost’ is able to do.) Meditating on his past self in , Eliot confessed that ‘there are always some choices sooner or later which are irrevocable and, whether you make the right one or the wrong one, there is no going back on it.’ The same term is used to herald Harry’s homecoming (and is repeated throughout the play): ‘It is going to be rather painful for Harry . . . to come back to Wishwood . . . because everything is irrevocable’ (CPP ). In the play’s first scene, Agatha foretells Harry’s ghostly encounter: . . . at Wishwood he will find another Harry. The man who returns will have to meet The boy who left . . . In the plantation, down the corridor That led to the nursery, round the corner Of the new wing, he will have to face him – And it will not be a very jolly corner. When the loop in time comes – and it does not come for everybody – The hidden is revealed, and the spectres show themselves.

(CPP –)

Ronald Bush’s inspection of the original manuscript of the play leaves no doubt that the echo is deliberate: it ‘made the reference even more striking by apologizing for having made an allusion.’ In performance, the

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

unresolved dualities of the play’s protagonist seem to have spilled out into the audience. Critiquing the play some years later, Eliot described it as failing to achieve a redemptive reunification, the audience ‘being left in a divided frame of mind’. The decade in which Eliot wrote ‘Burnt Norton’ and The Family Reunion was clearly one in which he was brooding on the doubled self, both poetically and personally. On  June  Eliot gave the valedictory address at Milton Academy, the Massachusetts preparatory school from which he himself had graduated twenty-seven years earlier. For the poet, returning not only to the school but to the country that he had left to pursue a different type of life, the occasion represented an uncomfortably resonant encounter with the ghost of his former self. Eliot frames his address around the question ‘Whom am I to talk to?’ and explains that he has decided to take more or less a metaphorical figure and make him as real as I could – that is, it occurred to me to say a few words to the ghost of myself at the age of seventeen or thereabouts, whom we may suppose to be skulking somewhere about this hall. I have always wanted to say something to him and I have a number of grievances against that character.

The charming levity and hammed up antagonism of this imagined encounter (‘my ghost . . . does not like me any better than I like him’) have the effect of distancing past and present selves. The ghostly schoolboy is subjected to a lecture from the cantankerous elder statesman: ‘I should like to face him and say: “Now look at me. See what a mess you have made of things. What have you got to say for yourself?”’ The deeper into his lesson Eliot gets, however, the more he finds the surety of hindsight giving way. Eventually, he admits to getting ‘into a weaker and weaker position in dealing with this ghost of mine, whom I had wanted to cow’. Ronald Bush’s claim that Eliot and Joyce, by the time they came to write Four Quartets and Finnegans Wake, were ‘no longer driven to seek their buried selves’ is confusing, given his insightful suggestion a few pages later that ‘Eliot’s Milton Academy remarks, like the poems and plays he wrote soon afterward, inevitably revert to “The Jolly Corner”.’ Bush is, however, silent about a second darker and more significant shadowing in the Milton Academy Address. Recounting one ‘of the bravest acts that I know of’, Eliot describes a ruinous collision with one’s doppelgänger that adheres closely to the psychospiritual contours of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ (). A German-speaking friend who fought in the English army during the Great War captured a German officer strikingly similar to himself in appearance. After questioning the man for several

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Gestation and Resurrection

days, the Englishman stole across the German lines and impersonated his double, gaining information on troop movements and other intelligence. After living amongst the enemy for a number of weeks, the Englishman slipped up by quoting Shakespeare in English: . . . a young officer with whom he had made very particular friends and of whom he had become very fond . . . was suspicious . . . in order to get back to the English lines he had to shoot the man with whom he had made friends. He got back, went to his commanding officer and reported . . . then he went out and the officer had him followed and they got him in time and he was six months in a hospital.

In this narrative, the divided selves are temporarily and uncomfortably fused, with the result that assuming the place of the double becomes a (double) act of self-murder. The Englishman becomes his adversary, fights as his adversary, and befriends his adversary’s friends. But finally – in order to return to his original self – he must shoot the man he has befriended in his German guise. This compound act of abnegation results in such guilt that he attempts a literal suicide. A doppelgänger episode of almost equal violence appears in Eliot’s later play, The Cocktail Party (), although the encounter is related at a remove from the dramatic action on stage and contained within another’s recollection. In the aftermath of Celia’s martyrdom, the psychologist Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly reveals his premonitory vision of Celia’s doppelgänger: When I first met Miss Coplestone, in this room, I saw the image, standing behind her chair, Of a Celia Coplestone whose face showed the astonishment Of the first five minutes after a violent death.

(CPP )

Harcourt-Reilly expands his narrative by quoting from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden. That apparition, sole of men, he saw. For know there are two worlds of life and death: One that which thou beholdest; but the other Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit The shadows of all forms that think and live Till death unite them and they part no more!

George Franklin can find no immediate reason for Eliot’s inclusion of this passage, as ‘the quotation adds nothing in terms of sense to Reilly’s own

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Dark Doubles

subsequent answer’. Franklin sees its inclusion as purely dramatic, giving ‘mythological structure and authority . . . to Reilly’s vision’. Yet the passage does more than create a mythological frame on which to hang Reilly’s prescience. It is important because it affirms the autoscopic symbolism of the ‘dead child’, the double, with which the play (and its creator) is so preoccupied. The psychological action of the play repeatedly skips between contradictory ideas of the inner child: as signifying a lost and static adulthood – as in Edward Chamberlayne (‘a child who has wandered into a forest / Playing with an imaginary playmate’ (CPP )) – and as an indwelling vestige of innocence, which may, in some sense, be regained. Celia’s doppelgänger can be distinguished from other doubled phenomena in Eliot’s work in one important respect: Celia is unaware of her doppelgänger. Its appearance to Harcourt-Reilly signals her exceptionalism, but does not represent a true self-division. It is not spiritual self-confrontation, but the plight of the Kinkanjan natives, that provides the savage context for her self-actualisation and transcendence. This may in part be because the nature of writing for the theatre requires an externalisation of the deep processes of the soul, a problem Eliot dwelt on in ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, where he discussed his difficulty in giving voice to the internalised spiritual turmoil of Thomas Beckett. Yet Eliot did attempt to portray Beckett’s struggle, just as he depicted Harry Piper accosted by the Furies (a choice, he admitted, that was a notorious dramatic failure). An alternate explanation rests on masculine psychology rather than stagecraft: Literary doppelgängers are typically a male phenomenon. Alan Cuthbert writes that it ‘has been largely the preserve of men, representing the Faustian prerogative to be split between two souls or identities . . . any cases of female doubling tend to be a symptom of objectification for the schismatic desires of a male subject rather than exploring the possibility of constitutional splits in female subjectivity.’ Eliot’s West End plays all feature individuals suffering from some form of self-division. In The Confidential Clerk (), Colby Simpkins describes what should be a simple change in career direction in surprisingly violent terms: I’m not at all sure that I like the other person That I feel myself becoming – though he fascinates me. And yet from time to time, when I least expect it, When my mind is cleared and empty, walking in the street Or waking in the night, then the former person, The person I used to be, returns to take possession . . . I have to fight that person.

(CPP )

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Gestation and Resurrection

(Perhaps this is not so surprising, given that the change involves an abstention from artistic creation, and accordingly a suppression of the ‘latent, bewildered presence and energy’, which might well rise up to take possession.) Although The Elder Statesman () is an altogether more conventional treatment of self-confrontation than any other in Eliot’s work, it is interesting that even at such an established stage of his literary career, Eliot was sufficiently preoccupied with the idea to weave it through his final play. Lord Claverton (formerly Dick Ferry) is awoken to the slow dwindling of his old, departed selves by Fred Culverwell (cover-well?): I parted from myself by a sudden effort, You, so slowly and sweetly, that you’ve never woken up To the fact that Dick Ferry died long ago.

Despite his resistance to a confrontation with his past self, Claverton is aware of the bifurcated nature of his tormentors. ‘They are merely ghosts: / Spectres from my past . . . Though it was not till lately that I found the living persons / Whose ghosts tormented me’ (CPP , ). The encounter in ‘Little Gidding’ stands in startling distinction to other instances. Here, the leaf-blown double is propelled towards a collision with the speaker. The ghost in ‘Little Gidding’ is hurled, unresisting, into an encounter with speaker by the ‘urban dawn wind’, a phrase that recalls the dawn that ‘wrinkles and slides’, ‘out at sea’ in ‘East Coker’ (P , ). There, as here, it signifies a shifting metaphysical terrain in which the bilocated soul cannot reintegrate, divided between the present ‘I’ and the original self: ‘I am here / Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning’ (P ). The compound ghost is the culminating embodiment of the unity-individedness that is so prevalent in Four Quartets. The concept of ‘intersection’ – both an encounter and a sundering, from the Latin ‘sectare’, ‘to cut’ – that echoes through ‘The Dry Salvages’ (‘The point of intersection of the timeless / With time’) and ‘Little Gidding’ (‘the intersection of the timeless moment’) (P , ) is explicitly related to the dislocation from familiarity that attends on encounters with doppelgängers and spectres in ‘To Walter de la Mare’: When the familiar scene is suddenly strange Or the well known is what we have yet to learn, And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change . . .

(P )

The opening line of this stanza, which hangs its meaning on the stress of ‘familiar’ and ‘strange’, appears to echo ‘Little Gidding’ with its ‘familiar’

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Dark Doubles

ghost ‘Too strange . . . for misunderstanding’. The later poem teems with ghosts and the unseen. The whispered incantations and spectral twangling on an ‘invisible web’ maddens cats and summons ‘the phantoms of the mind’, but stops short of granting articulacy to its ghostly presences, gathering them up instead into ‘the inexplicable mystery of sound’ (P ). The ghost of ‘Little Gidding’ has both speech and (shifting) substance. It appears aware of the climactic nature and destructive potential of the confrontation: its face is ‘down-turned’, and the speaker must fix upon it with ‘pointed scrutiny’ in the ‘waning dusk’ in order to catch: . . . the sudden look of some dead master Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled Both one and many; in the brown baked features The eyes of a familiar compound ghost Both intimate and unidentifiable.

(P –)

Scholars have found in the dead master a commingling of Dante, Yeats, Coleridge, Swift, Mallarmé, and Whitman. Yet the most immediate identification is that of the poet’s mirrored self. The figure is ‘unidentifiable’ yet ‘intimate’: So I assumed a double part, and cried And heard another’s voice cry: ‘What! are you here?’ Although we were not. I was still the same, Knowing myself yet being someone other – And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed To compel the recognition they preceded.

(P )

The narrator apprehends his own bilocation. He assumes ‘a double part’, and hears ‘another’s voice’ in his own cry. His consciousness that ‘we were not’ here suggests a removal even from the asphalt cityscape of the ‘urban dawn’, so that in the ‘waning dusk’ the ‘three districts whence the smoke arose’ transform from the bombed-out precincts of London to the regions of the past, present, and future, smoking with the chthonic vapours of a psycho-volcanic eruption. The dédoublement of the speaker is not a symptom of madness, but an exploration of psychological patrimony and a recognition of the inherent instability of the self. It is a powerful instance ‘of what Eliot eventually calls spiritual “recognition,” a phenomenon that occurs when the mind’s eye is caught off-guard by a presence in its peripheral vision, as familiar as

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Gestation and Resurrection

a reflection but nonetheless foreign, opaque, and utterly terrifying.’ Like an actor whose ritualised assumption of the accoutrements of the stage brings forth a character into being, so the narrator’s sudden awareness of ‘being someone other – / And he a face still forming’ solidifies the unformed clay of the autoscopic golem into a figure articulate and vital (his words ‘sufficed / To compel the recognition they preceded’). The compound ghost steps out from behind the silent wraiths of The Cocktail Party and The Family Reunion, and the hectoring projections of The Elder Statesman, and leaves behind the gentle spirits of children in the gardens of ‘Burnt Norton’ whose laughter shimmers into silence. Energised by the speaker’s self-recognition and imbued with the personae of the literary dead, it appears not as the pale shade of Heine, nor the ‘monstrous’ apparition that confronts Spencer Brydon with ‘a rage of personality before which his own collapsed’, but as the ghost of the ancients inhering in the self – Dante’s Virgil, the progenitors of Aeneas and Odysseus – bitter guides who tread the ways of fire, whose uncertain gifts are brought back from the abyss. Notes  Izaak Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Dr. Robert Sanderson (Boston, ), pp. –.  See the short story Lui.  My translation.  Joseph Conrad, ‘Henry James: An Appreciation’, Notes on Life and Letters (London, ), pp. , , .  Miller, Doubles, p. .  Ibid., p. vi.  Alan W. Cuthbert, ‘Doppelgänger’, in Colin Blakemore and Sheila Jennett (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Body (Oxford, ), Oxford Reference Online,  May .  Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, p. .  Ibid., pp. , .  Ibid., p. .  ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, OPP, pp. , , .  Ibid., pp. , .  Ibid., p. .  ‘Critical Note to The Collected Poems of Harold Monro, ed. Alida Monro, with a biographical sketch by F. S. Flint’, Prose IV, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Stead, New Poetic, pp. , .  Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, pp. , .  Stead, New Poetic, p. .

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 Compare Eliot’s admission to Conrad Aiken that he suffered from ‘nervous sexual attacks’ when alone in cities (specifically, Paris and London).  Dec. , Letters I, p. .  Anthony J. Cuda. ‘Who Stood over Eliot’s Shoulder?’, Modern Language Quarterly / (Sep. ), .  Christopher Ricks, ‘Eliot and the Auditory Imagination’, paper delivered at the T. S. Eliot International Summer School, School of Advanced Study, Institute of English Studies, University of London,  Jul. .  E. Martin Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays (; Cambridge, ), p. . Compare the ‘subterrene music’ Eliot found in Shakespeare’s plays, discussed in Part I.  A. D. Moody, ‘Eliot and Pound: Exemplary Differences’, paper delivered at the T. S. Eliot International Summer School,  Jul. , School of Advanced Study, Institute of English Studies, University of London.  Letters I, p. .  As described in Part I (‘a person who has dived very deep and comes up holding firmly some hitherto unseen submarine creature’). Letters I, p. .  Compare ‘this systole and diastole, this movement to and fro, of approach and withdrawal’ in the rhythms of criticism. ‘Goethe as the Sage’ (), OPP, p. .  ‘Ben Jonson’ (), Prose II, pp. , –.  Gordon, An Imperfect Life, p. .  Smith, Poetry and Plays, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Compare ‘Hidden under the heron’s wing’ (P ). Again, the ellipses are Eliot’s.  Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, p. .  ‘Doris’s Dream Songs’, The Chapbook  (), –.  ‘Song to the Opherian’, . The poem is reproduced under the title ‘Song’ in P, p. .  ‘It is possible that Eliot meant “Orpharion” (from Orpheus and Arion)’ (Facs ).  Marc Manganaro, ‘Dissociation in “Dead Land”: The Primitive Mind in the Early Poetry of T. S. Eliot’, Journal of Modern Literature / (March ), .  Ibid., .  Stephen Spender, T. S. Eliot (London, ), p. .  Slim Aarons, ‘A Wonderful Time’, Holiday Magazine (Mar. ). Now available as ‘Poet’s Paradise’ (Getty Images JG and JG).  First published in English in the British Journal of Psychology /, part , .  Alan Porter, ‘Jung’s Psychology’, Criterion / (Jul. ), .  Ibid., .  ‘Mr. Lee Masters’, Manchester Guardian  ( Oct. ), .  Porter, ‘Jung’s Psychology’, .  Spender, T. S. Eliot, p. .

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 Ibid., p. .  Cuthbert, ‘Doppelgänger’.  ‘LXIX’ (), Emily Dickinson, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Rachel Wetzsteon (New York, ), p. .  Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, pp. –.  ‘I’ve spent my life . . . in trying to identify myself with the part / I had chosen to play’, describing himself as ‘a broken-down actor’ (CPP –).  Eliot quotes the line from Hamlet in SV, II, p. .  See also Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, p. .  Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York, ), p. .  Letters III, p. .  Letter to William James,  Sep. , quoted in Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, a Biography (Baltimore, ), p. .  James, ‘Introduction to The Tempest’, p. .  ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’, Prose I, p. .  Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, p. .  ‘In Memory’, Prose I, p. .   Apr. , Letters IV, pp. –.  ‘Preface’, in Edgar Ansel Mowrer, This American World (London, ), pp. xiii–xiv.  C. D. Blanton, ‘London’, in Harding, T. S. Eliot in Context, p. .  Henry James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, in The New York Stories of Henry James, ed. Colm Tóibín (New York, ), pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Edward Lobb, ‘The Family Reunion: Eliot, James, and the Buried Life’, Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate /– (/), , .  ‘Milton Academy Address’, Prose IV, p. .  Bush, Character and Style, p. .  ‘Poetry and Drama’ (), On Poetry and Poets, p. .  ‘Milton Academy Address’, Prose IV, p. .  Ibid., pp. , , .  Bush, Character and Style, pp. x, .  ‘Milton Academy Address’, Prose IV, p. .  ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend. / I knew you in this dark’. Wilfred Owen, Collected Poems, ed. C. Day-Lewis (London, ), p. .  ‘Milton Academy Address’, Prose IV, p. .  George Franklin, ‘Instances of Meeting: Shelley and Eliot: A Study in Affinity’, ELH / (winter ), .  Ibid., .  ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, OPP, p. .  ‘Poetry and Drama’, OPP, p. .  Cuthbert, ‘Doppelgänger’.

Dark Doubles

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 James, ‘Introduction to The Tempest’, p. .  See Gregory S. Jay, T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History (Baton Rouge, ), pp. –; Leonard Unger, Eliot’s Compound Ghost: Influence and Confluence (University Park, ), pp. –; Gardner, Composition of Four Quartets, p. ; K. Narayana Chandran, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Ghostly Compound: Coleridge and Whitman in Little Gidding II’, ANQ / (winter ), –; and Denis Donoghue, ‘Three Presences: Yeats, Eliot, Pound’, in Irish Essays (Cambridge, ), p. .  Cuda, ‘Who Stood over Eliot’s Shoulder?’, .  James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. .

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Blood for the Ghosts

And I, becoming other and many, cried . . . I was always dead, Always revived, and always something other . . .  trattando l’ombre come cosa salda (treating shades as solid things)

The following lines appear in The Family Reunion – a play ‘jostled by ghosts’ (CPP ) – written during the poetic intermission between ‘Burnt Norton’ and ‘East Coker’: Spring is an issue of blood A season of sacrifice And the fail of the new full tide Returning the ghosts of the dead Those whom the winter drowned Do not the ghosts of the drowned Return to land in the spring? Do the dead want to return? ... And what of the terrified spirit Compelled to be reborn To rise toward the violent sun Wet wings into the rain cloud Harefoot over the moon?

(CPP )

As is apparent from this passage, imbued with a visceral and visionary pagan mysticism, Eliot’s poetry (including his dramatic poetry) became more, not less, possessed by inner presences so that in the later works his spectres might solidify to become a source of primitive lifeblood, entwined with the conscious self in a dynamic of ambivalent exchange. Book Eleven of Homer’s Odyssey contains the foundational image of this symbiosis, in 

Blood for the Ghosts

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its account of Odysseus’s nekuia: a journey into the underworld and propitiatory blood sacrifice to its ghosts, in order that they might find prophetic voice. Odysseus is warned that his entry into the Kingdom of Hades will be greeted by thronging, silent spectres. Like the pale rasping creatures in Eliot’s Hollow Men, these blurred and breathless dead are unable to speak and impart their secrets. In order to receive the wisdom of the underworld and continue his search for Ithaca, Odysseus must insanguinate the shades (specifically, the ghost of Tiresias) and provide a fresh sheep as instructed by Circe in Book Eleven, lines –: . . . Any dead man Whom you allow to enter where the blood is Will speak to you, and speak the truth; but those Deprived will grow remote again and fade.

In his lectures ‘On Greek Historical Writing’ given at Oxford in  (and subsequently translated by Gilbert Murray), the German classical scholar Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff likened the act of historical interpretation to the Homeric picture of ghosts revived by the blood of the living, warning that in the very process of revival the ghosts inevitably absorb an alien element: We know that ghosts cannot speak until they have drunk blood; and the spirits which we evoke demand the blood of our hearts. We give it to them gladly; but if they then abide our question, something from us has entered into them; something alien, that must be cast out, cast out in the name of truth!

In its passage from pre-history to the nineteenth century, the Homeric nekuia story takes on strange and complicating resonances: no longer merely the blood of a sheep, but ‘the blood of our hearts’ must be surrendered. And in this act of surrender, something of us is taken up by the ancient ghosts, so that we inhere in them just as surely as they live in us. For Wilamowitz-Moellendorff that ‘something’ was a damaging anachronism – the same uncritical projection of modern consciousness onto the distant past that Eliot complained of in the writings of the great nineteenth-century scholars of comparative mythology. In a  graduate paper he criticised E. B. Tylor and Andrew Lang for their ‘defective theory of knowledge’ in assuming a ‘uniformity of mind’ between modern and primitive, and suggested that their hypothesis was falsely grounded in ‘the fact that we feel that this is what we should do were we in the savage’s place.’ But others were also making use of Homer’s account, for purposes literary and psychological. By  Eliot had forsaken his Harvard studies

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Gestation and Resurrection

in philosophy and comparative religion and was lamenting the superficiality and isolation of contemporary poetry, in a Homeric language of his own: ‘No dead voices speak through the living voice: no reincarnation, no re-creation.’ In  he wrote: And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

(P )

These lines from ‘Little Gidding’ recognise the cross-contact of souls as the animating pulse beneath his own poetic language. In , Eliot’s great collaborator Ezra Pound wrote of the vitalising effect of possession by the dead – a form of internalised resurrection – possibly under the influence of Wilamowitz-Moellendorff’s lectures of that year. His poem ‘Histrion’ () professes to draw generative strength from the propitiated dead: . . . yet I know, how that the souls of all men great At times pass through us, And we are melted into them, and are not Save reflexions of their souls. Thus am I Dante for a space and am One François Villon, ballad-lord and thief . . . 

Pound’s ghosts grant a paradoxical virility to his verses and infuse his literary soul (which is otherwise, the poet says, a ‘clear space’). By contrast, Eliot’s poems of a similar period portray modern souls without such savage sustenance, as vacuous impostors imbued with a pale deathliness. The Prufrockian personas of ‘Portrait of a Lady’, the ‘Preludes’, and ‘La Figlia Che Piange’ are implicitly (and at times explicitly) comparable to Hamlet in their ennui and existential stasis. In a  essay on Hamlet A. D. Nuttall figures the play as a series of ghostly encounters, reading ‘the Ghost’s persisting love for Gertrude as a kind of hunger for life in the midst of death, making him for a moment like the thirsting, bloodless shades in Homer’s Odyssey.’ He persuasively argues that ‘Hamlet is paralysed partly because he has become one of them, a dead man walking among the living, opposite to life’.  It is revealing that as a young critic Eliot could find no ‘objective correlative’ to explain Hamlet’s pallid equivocations – although he realised that the play ‘is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light’, and equally revealing that he revised his objections some years later. (Unlike Eliot, Virginia Woolf seems to have been highly aware of the ghostly presences in the play,

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writing: ‘Thus forced always to look back or sidelong at his own past the critic sees something moving or vanishing in Hamlet, as in a glass one sees the reflection of oneself.’) Nuttall’s essay explores the ghosted layers of meaning within Hamlet’s opening not-quite-spectral encounter: ‘Who’s there?’ says Barnardo, . . . in the cold darkness on the castle platform. These are the first words of the play, and it is hard to see how they could be bettered. They carry, as often in Shakespeare, both an immediate meaning and a larger meaning, which is not simultaneously present but can grow in the mind as the play unfolds. Barnardo means only, ‘Who goes there?’, the sentry’s challenge. The larger meaning is, ‘Who is there, in the darkness, among the dead?’ As I struggle to paraphrase, I find myself in danger of opting too easily for the more usual phrases: ‘Is there life beyond the grave?’ ‘Are there human existences on the far side of what we call death?’ But these fail to take account of a certain grammatical peculiarity in Shakespeare’s words; the sentry’s challenge, though formally in the third person singular, is partly infiltrated by a sense of a second person singular, arising from the fact that the question posed is addressed to its presumed subject. In which case we must modify our paraphrase, perhaps to ‘Who, of you who are dead, is there?’ The very awkwardness of the sentence is instructive. The English language naturally resists such a combination of second and third persons. Yet some such phrasing is needed, because Hamlet is not a cool treatise on death but is instead about an encounter with a dead person.

A related ‘grammatical peculiarity’ is present, too, in the walker’s challenge to the ghost of ‘Little Gidding’. His ‘“What! are you here?”’ occupies a disquieting grammatical limbo between singular and plural, emphasised and complicated by the coda ‘Although we were not . . . Both one and many’. The simultaneous awareness of infiltration by the dead (‘Knowing myself yet being someone other’) and separation (‘I was still the same’) is an altogether more powerful engagement with the afterlife than the abolie of Prufrock’s ‘“Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”’ As others have suggested, Eliot’s sense of the hidden life had more in common with Matthew Arnold’s than he may have wished to admit. Arnold’s ‘The Buried Life’ () contains the following passage: There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force . . . and long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well – but ’tis not true! 

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Gestation and Resurrection

Recurrent motives of a painful spring rebirth are apparent in poems like ‘Portrait of a Lady’ () – ‘My buried life, and Paris in the Spring’ – which directly borrows Arnold’s phrase; in the sprouting corpses and stirring roots of The Waste Land (); in ‘Whispers of Immortality’ (), where ‘Daffodil bulbs instead of balls / Stared from the sockets of the eyes’; and in The Family Reunion. The editors of a  anthology of Victorian poetry give a rather mechanistic summary of the proto-Jungian overtones of Arnold’s ‘hidden self’: The implication seems to be that if we could know and follow the hidden self, we would live more fully because then the subconscious drive . . . and the conscious will would be synchronized and the personality integrated.

Writing after Arnold, Jung used the concept of nekuia as an integral part of his analytical psychology, internalising Odysseus’s interrogation of the dead as the ‘introversion of the conscious mind into the deeper layers of the unconscious psyche’. The wide cultural currency and overtly psychological dimension of the nekuia is evident in the review of Jung’s writings published in the Criterion in . Alan Porter’s essay (like so many of Eliot’s own) slips the bonds of its detached critical context and shimmers with the live presences of its author’s preoccupations: Psycho-analysts seemed to discover, in the catacombs of the soul, the bones of dead men and the débris of ages. They are not dead, Dr. Jung asserted; they are crying for air. We know they are dead, said the psycho-analysts, by the stench they make. And if we confine the living in underground cellars, replied Dr. Jung, if we allow them no light, no air, no movement, can we wonder at the foetor that rises? They are not dead as you mean it; they are the living dead; the once-living, the unborn, the everlasting, seeking a way out from the grave . . . Interest, impulse, and the subterranean movements of the will, must find body and expression on the earth. There is no angel, said Swedenborg, who was not once a man. The living dead, resurrected, breathing and dancing; these are the angels, says Dr. Jung.

The passage echoes The Hollow Men, where the netherworld of desiccated shades is a ‘dry cellar’, but offers a chance of communion beyond the reach of Eliot’s stuffed shades. Eliot himself concedes some possibility of revival, albeit a terrifying one, in The Family Reunion, where the inhabitants of Wishwood shiver at the phantasmal ‘noises in the cellar’ and fear the ‘dreadful disclosure’ of their source (CPP ). Porter’s final ‘breathing and dancing’ appropriately suggests an element of rapture or abandonment – the necessary danger of becoming lost just as one is found.

Blood for the Ghosts

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Jung, via Porter, conveys the metaphysical immediacy of the rites of entry to the underworld and questioning of the dead for soothsay. There is no doubt that Eliot was drawn to that which lies buried but which may yet give breath, but he seems only gradually to have arrived at the Homeric nekuia as the more precisely literary form of the ritual. Pound understood much earlier than Eliot the need for the poet to offer ‘blood for the ghosts’. It was Pound who, in his sustained creative interest in the nekuia, repeatedly emphasised its specifically poetic dimension, its encoding of the necromantic mysteries of literary patrimony. The first of The Cantos revisits the opening passage of Book Eleven of The Odyssey, chronicling Odysseus’s katabasis (descent into the Underworld) and nekuia: A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep. Dark blood flowed in the fosse, Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, . . . These many crowded about me; with shouting, Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts; . . . then Tiresias Theban, Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first: ‘A second time? why? man of ill star, ‘Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region? ‘Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever ‘For soothsay.’ And I stepped back, And he strong with the blood, said then: ‘Odysseus ‘Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, ‘Lose all companions.’

In Canto I, the ‘blood for the ghosts’ becomes a Poundian ‘metaphor for infusing the past with his own living presence’, an unwieldy act of cooperative reconstruction and reintegration. It is the translator’s gift to his sources, rhythmic resuscitation and linguistic transfusion. The processes of reconstruction are inherently compositive – as Wilamowitz-Moellendorff had warned and as Pound was well aware. His refiguring of Homer’s narrative is interrupted by the clamouring ghost of its fifteenth-century intermediary, Andreas Divus, whose translation Pound was working from: Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, In officina Wecheli, , out of Homer.

In Canto II, Pound encounters another compound ghost, the historical Sordello – a thirteenth-century Mantuan troubadour – intermingled with his literary incarnations in Dante’s Purgatorio, in works by Camille Chabaneau and Browning (‘Hang it all, Robert Browning, / there can be

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Gestation and Resurrection

but the one “Sordello.” / But Sordello, and my Sordello?’), and ‘ – ultimately, and inescapably – some Sordello of Pound’s own invention.’ In The Anxiety of Influence (), his celebrated typology of literary evasion and indebtedness, Harold Bloom’s final category is apophrades, the return of the dead. Named for the unclean, moonless days of the Athenian calendar ‘upon which the dead return to inhabit their former houses’, Bloom’s description assumes a bilateral ratio of pollution and purification – there is none of the complicating generosity of Pound’s willing infusion to his forebears. Bloom writes: . . . strong poets keep returning from the dead . . . How they return is the decisive matter, for if they return intact, then the return impoverishes the later poets, dooming them to be remembered – if at all – as having ended in poverty, in an imaginative need they could not themselves gratify. ... Apophrades, when managed by the capable imagination, by the strong poet who has persisted in his strength, becomes not so much a return of the dead as a celebration of the return of the early self-exaltation that first made poetry possible.

Pound’s literary involutions at the beginning of the Cantos appear to bear out Bloom’s observation that ‘the mighty dead return, but they return in our colours, and speaking in our voices, at least in part, at least in moments, moments that testify to our persistence, and not to their own.’ And yet. Despite having placed the nekuia episode at the beginning of the Cantos as published in , Pound could not lay it to rest. His excavatory interest acquires an almost evangelical tone in a letter to W. H. D. Rouse written in May : The Nekuia shouts aloud that it is older than the rest, all that island, Cretan, etc., hinter-time, that it is not Praxiteles, not Athens of Pericles, but Odysseus . . . The deep is so deep, like clear fathoms down.

He returned to the scene, reimagining it in Canto XLVII (first published in ): Who even dead, yet hath his mind entire! This sound came in the dark First must thou go the road to hell . . . to see Tiresias, Eyeless that was, a shade, that is in hell So full of knowing that the beefy men know less than he, Ere thou come to thy road’s end. Knowledge the shade of a shade . . . 

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Blood for the Ghosts

Compared with Canto I, the vision of the dead is both more tenuous and more urgent: more is at stake for the quester after soothsay. In Canto I, Tiresias speaks having been made ‘strong with the blood’. Canto XLVII makes no mention of the blood sacrifice, portraying a teeming darkness in which Tiresias dwells, ‘his mind entire’. The dead wait, moving upon their own purposes in ‘the overhanging dark’. The ratio of need is reversed: Odysseus is debased, ‘Knowing less than drugged beasts’, compelled to ‘sail after knowledge’, yet the knowledge to be gained is somehow impoverishing, but ‘the shade of a shade’. Such calibrations of past and present identity – both within and between Pound’s texts – are what Kenner calls ‘a self-interfering pattern’, ‘a function of a function’, and an ‘autochthonous knot’. In his summary of Pound’s insight, Kenner emphasises the element of possession without straying into consequences: ‘If we are properly prepared, if we have performed the propitiatory rituals, the great dead may possess us’. Canto XLVII seems more aware than its predecessor of the existential dangers of such possession. It contains a fragmented litany of vegetation ceremonies and images of propitiatory sacrifice (‘The bull runs blind on the sword’). It assembles the Mesopotamian Tammuz and the Levantine Adonis (‘Tammuz! Tammuz!’, ‘The sea is streaked red with Adonis’, ‘Adanis [sic] falleth. / Fruit cometh after’) together with the related folk practice of the festival of Montallegre Madonna in Rapallo, in a mosaic of the rites of spring that draws on Frazer’s Dying God as Eliot had done in the notes to The Waste Land. What is being offered up is the poet’s metaphysical integrity. Like the shamans and the mystics, Pound’s Ulyssean poet must throw himself open to an afflatus by entities whose benevolence is at best uncertain. A related ambivalence appears in ‘East Coker’ (published three years after Canto XLVII), which both yearns towards and recoils from a metaphysical untethering: . . . not only in the middle of the way But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble, On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold, And menaced by monsters, fancy lights, Risking enchantment. (P –)

‘East Coker’, which instances the commencement of a poetic katabasis (the nekuia appears later, in stages, in ‘The Dry Salvages’ and ‘Little Gidding’),

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contains a pointed indictment of ‘old men’ whose ‘deliberate hebetude’ reveals them to have inherited the wasting curse of The Hollow Men: Do not let me hear Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly, Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession, Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

(P )

These ‘quiet-voiced elders’ recall the hollow men whose desiccated voices murmur without meaning, their wisdom dead and surrounded by darkness. Their turning from vision (fearfully averting their eyes) is a critical failure of psychological courage, terminating in the sightlessness of The Hollow Men (‘The eyes are not here / There are no eyes here’). The reigning duality of ‘East Coker’s ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ points towards other doublings, sunderings, and submersions (‘The houses are all gone under the sea’, ‘The dancers are all gone under the hill’). The modern world of stock exchanges and company directors is a pays des morts; the poem enacts a ‘silent funeral’ for those whose superficial existence is a death-in-life. The self-evasiveness of these archetypes of the commercial represents a more virulent, pallid deathliness than the peasants sunk in ancestral soil (‘Earth feet, loam feet’). The representatives of form without substance are impelled out into the ‘vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant’. Echoing the pervasive dryness of The Hollow Men, the ‘dark, dark, dark’ passage of ‘East Coker’ is bereft of water imagery. It references light and shadow, ‘the Sun and Moon’, interstellar spaces, hills and trees, all of which are subsumed within the palpable moral darkness of a Miltonic Hell (‘yet from those flames / No light, but rather darkness visible’). The stilling of the soul in the chthonic darkness of the theatre or the underground is a precondition of what Kenner calls a ‘Romantic quest for purity’, a search for the pre-iterative origins of poetic speech in the depths of the literary underworld. The earliest instance of water occurs at the end of the passage, in the ‘whisper of running streams’ that echoes the ecstasy of ‘death and birth’. Part Four – most obviously a metaphysical analogy of the sacrament – can also be read as internalising the nekuia: The dripping blood our only drink, The bloody flesh our only food.

(P )

The body and blood of Christ are the archetypal sacrificial meal, imbibed here by shades who mistake themselves for ‘sound, substantial flesh and

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Blood for the Ghosts

blood’. ‘East Coker’ ends by embracing the Poundian imperative and signalling – in Jung’s phrase for the nekuia – ‘the night journey on the sea’, to be undertaken in ‘The Dry Salvages’: Old men ought to be explorers Here or there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning. (P –)

‘The Dry Salvages’ is a poem preoccupied with the ocean as site of painful renewal, via recourse to the rhythms of the dead. Although no ghostly master appears, the poem allows in the voices of Homer and (by implication) his interpreters, Divus, Chapman, and Pound. Part One inhabits the same lexicon as Pound’s Canto XLVII, with its nocturnal landscape reaching seawards, its broken oars and dead men, and the canine lineaments of the dangerous waters. Compare Pound’s: From the long boats they have set lights in the water, The sea’s claw gathers them outward. Scilla’s dogs snarl at the cliff’s base, The white teeth gnaw in under the crag, But in the pale night the small lamps float seaward

with Eliot’s: The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation: ... The sea howl And the sea yelp, are different voices Often together heard: the whine in the rigging, The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water, The distant rote in the granite teeth, And the wailing warning from the approaching headland.

(P –)

Pound’s monstrous dogs, baying at Odysseus as he sails towards the entrance to the underworld, seem to irrupt from the charged landscape of Eliot’s sea poem like the ‘foreign dead men’ whose mute presence unfolds the poem’s horizons in time and space.

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Gestation and Resurrection

The third section escapes its own initial hesitancy of tone with the sudden interpolation ‘Fare forward, travellers!’, an irruption that recalls the multivalent voices of Pound’s Canto I (‘Lie quiet, Divus’). This sense of instability and intervention is also present when the tolling of the sea bell ‘Measures time not our time,’ where the final three words seem to rebound in protest at inclusion in an earthly ‘scheme of generation’ in a barely registrable instance of anacoluthon – ‘not us’, the dead seem to say, ‘we are not of your time’ (P ). The poem links to Pound’s rendering of ‘the ocean flowing backward’ in its line ‘And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back’ (P ). The voyagers, first encountered in the banality of a train journey, suddenly appear in an altogether more momentous context ‘on the deck of the drumming liner / Watching the furrow that widens behind’. That furrow suggests the ocean as a site of fecundation (prefiguring ‘the life of significant soil’ that closes the poem). It also recalls the linkage, in Canto XLVII, of the nekuia in its prophetic aspect as a ritual renewing the covenant between past and future, with the agricultural cycles of plowing and harvest: . . . The small lights drift out with the tide, sea’s claw has gathered them outward, Four banners to every flower The sea’s claw draws the lamps outward. Think thus of thy plowing When the seven stars go down to their rest

In the ‘drumming’ of the ocean liner the scene’s soundscape reiterates the rhythm of the pulse, stirring the auditory imagination. Eliot was very sensitive to the ways in which ‘the conditions of modern life . . . have altered our perception of rhythms,’ and explicitly linked the ‘sensory life’ to the throb of ‘the internal combustion engine’. Sound-consciousness was a major element of Pound’s philological and poetic project. In a  letter Pound described his phrase ‘the imaginary / Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge’ from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley () as his best attempt at conveying the sound-sense of The Odyssey. Pound’s attempt to access the psyche of the Homeric imagination was deeply visceral. It required, as Hugh Kenner observes: working cadences and rhythms into the blood: mastering the cadences of the dead, their breathing (psyche); miming the beat their pulses shaped, the lips and throat moving as theirs moved, that the whole man might be open to their possession.

Blood for the Ghosts

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The sense of corporeal invasion, of being moved by the breath of the dead, is a particular feature of Homeric epic, deriving from its origins in a spoken, vatic tradition. Adam Nicolson describes the ‘fixed music of the hexameters’ as a ‘core repetitive mechanism’ analogous with ‘weaving patterned cloth or building wooden ships’ insofar as it cleaves to the ‘grace and commodity’ of the past. In Nicolson’s account – and in the account of the Homeric scholar Milman Parry, on which Nicolson draws – the rhythmic structure sustains ‘a music whose sense of its own overarching greatness matters more than any local meaning.’ As Nicolson writes, in theorising a Homeric entity antithetical to the singular genius, lit from within, ‘Parry had summoned a strange and troubling Homer from the depths, a poet entranced by his inheritance, almost blind in front of it, spooling out what the past had given him’. The poet who opens himself to possession by Homer risks inundation by the same daemons of the ancient, pre-literate world whose dactylic murmuring compelled and suffused the Ionic poet in eighth-century Chios. In Eliot’s poesis, and especially in Four Quartets, the repeated symbiotic encounters with ghosts who themselves are inhabited by an older revenant speech is a form of psychic and creative accrual, a return to and refiguring of the hidden musics considered in Part I. Intimating something of this process as underlying Eliot’s poetry, Pound explicitly elides Eliot and Tiresias in his notes in the margins of The Waste Land draft: ‘make up yr. Mind / you Tiresias / if you know[,] know damn well or else you don’t’ (Facs ). The possession by, confrontation with, and liberation from the past is part of what Ronald Bush calls ‘a complicated interchange between imagination and world, self and other, past and present, culture and culture, language and language.’ Kenner lists the characteristics of Canto I in a manner that indicates how extensively the sea imagery in ‘The Dry Salvages’ makes contrastive use of similar phonological forms (although Pound, unlike Eliot, explicitly mimics Anglo-Saxon): Canto I (as it eventually became), with its thudding alliteration, its Saxon vocables . . . its Anglo-Norman compounds . . . its Greek survivals . . . its prevalent monosyllables . . . its Homeric narrative and its injunction to Divus, recapitulates the story of a pattern persisting undeformable while many languages have flowed through it and many more pronunciations in the thousands of years it has been a property of the Western mind.

The meditation on the sea’s many voices in the first section of ‘The Dry Salvages’ gains its flowing rhythm from ‘its prevalent monosyllables’

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(‘The salt is on the briar rose, / The fog is in the fir trees’), and ‘Saxon vocables’ (‘rank’, ‘swell’, ‘yelp’, ‘howl’). This despite Eliot’s general detachment from Pound’s interest in the Anglo-Saxon wellsprings of modern English. The two poems (like the two poets) exist within an interrelationship, urging each other further: Pound’s ‘sternward’ and ‘onward’ elicits Eliot’s ‘forward’, ‘backward’, ‘homeward’ – a directional confusion that suggests the poem’s continuing ambivalence as to its destination: Fare forward. O voyagers, O seamen, You who came to port, and you whose bodies Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea, Or whatever event, this is your real destination.

(P )

The ‘event’ (the voyage to the dead) and the ‘action’ (of writing it) is ‘the one action’ that shall have revivifying consequences in the lives of others. Although this is an essentially Christian mystery arising from the annunciation by Gabriel (‘a voice descanting’) to Mary, there is an inescapable underlying sense that the fructifying literary action is to be carried out in the lives of other (future) selves. The fragile balance between these selves is to be found in the ‘equal mind’ of deliberation. The presence of Krishna as the presiding god of this passage underlines its intergenerational operation. The ‘real destination’ envisaged for the voyagers and seamen is not annihilation, but transmigration: to voyage onwards in the continuing life of the human psyche, ‘the life of significant soil’ (P , ). In ‘Little Gidding’, the quest (‘if you came this way . . .’) finally arrives at a place of confrontation. The deadened outer layers are shed (‘a shell, a husk of meaning / From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled’), overwhelmed by the ritualistic deaths of the elements that precede the appearance of the compound ghost. The walker in ‘interminable night’ entreats the ghost for soothsay. Thus acknowledged, the dead make answer, their speech ‘tongued with fire beyond the language of the living’. Eliot’s re-enactment of the nekuia pays a subtle (and perhaps unconscious) tribute to Pound, weaving a phantasmal audition of il miglior fabbro into the ‘com-Pound’ ghost. The substance of the ghost’s communication is not, in the final instance, as important as the fact of the encounter. The ghost’s caveat (‘last year’s words belong to last year’s language / And next year’s words await another voice’) suggests that the process of encounter and retrieval is an ongoing one, which must be repeated by others (and other selves). ‘Eliot’, writes Bloom, ‘became a



Blood for the Ghosts

master at reversing the apophrades’, although perhaps for Eliot it is not so much mastery as surrender to the tides that saves him from drowning. The spectre dissolves, having left behind the ‘dark matter’ of the poem. But the ghostly incursive presences recur at the ebb tide of ‘Little Gidding’ (‘Every poem an epitaph . . .’): We die with the dying: See, they depart, and we go with them. We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them.

(P )

These lines turn and turn again, looking back to Pound’s The Return (): See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, ... See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened; ... These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood.

Notes  ‘Little Gidding’ first draft,  Jul. . Gardner, Composition of Four Quartets, p. .  Purgatorio, Canto XXI, l. . The last line of the epigraph to the  edition of Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations ().  Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (London, ), pp. , .  Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Greek Historical Writing and Apollo: Two Lectures Delivered before the University of Oxford June  and , , trans. Gilbert Murray (Oxford, ), p. .  The theme reappears in Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, ).  ‘The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual’, Prose I, pp. , .  Auden imagined that in death Yeats ‘became his admirers . . . scattered among a hundred cities’, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ (), Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York, ), p. . The dead poet’s ‘selfhood is transfused into their lives . . . in their own time. They, and the poets who refashion his art . . . become his new avatar.’ Smith, Use of Memory, p. .



Gestation and Resurrection

 ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry [IV]’ (), Prose II, p. .  Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations (New York, ), p. .  See Hugh Kenner, ‘Blood for the Ghosts’, in Eva Hesse (ed.), New Approaches to Ezra Pound. A Co-ordinated Investigation of Pound’s Poetry and Ideas (London, ), pp. –.  Nuttall, ‘Hamlet: Conversations with the Dead’, pp. –.  ‘Hamlet’, Prose II, p. .  ‘Poetry and Drama’, OPP, pp. –.  Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’, . Woolf cut this passage from the  Hogarth Press edition (and subsequent editions).  Nuttall, ‘Hamlet: Conversations with the Dead’, p. .  See Bush, Character and Style; and Lobb, ‘Eliot, James, and the Buried Life’. Craig Raine constructs an account of Eliot’s oeuvre around this phrase: Craig Raine, T. S. Eliot (Oxford, ).  Matthew Arnold, ‘The Buried Life’ (), in W. E. Houghton and G. R. Stange (eds.), Victorian Poetry and Poetics (Boston, ), pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  C. G. Jung, Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice (New York, ), p. .  Porter, ‘Jung’s Psychology’, . My emphasis.  This imagery is not purely Jungian, of course, but exists within a tradition that includes Poe and Frost.  Pound, ‘Canto I’, Cantos, pp. –.  Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, ), p. .  Pound, ‘Canto I’, Cantos, p. .  Pound, ‘Canto VI’, Cantos, pp. –.  Pound, ‘Canto II’, Cantos, p. .  Mark Scroggins, ‘Blood to the Ghosts: Biography and the New Modernist Studies (with Special Reference to Louis Zukofsky)’, Flashpoint  (summer ), web edition.  Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford, ), pp. –, .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  ( May ), Letters of Ezra Pound, pp. –.  Pound, ‘Canto XLVII’, Cantos, p. .  Ibid.  Kenner, Pound Era, p. .  Kenner, ‘Blood for the Ghosts’, pp. , .  Pound, ‘Canto XLVII’, Cantos, pp. –.  OED: ‘the imparting of an over-mastering impulse, poetic or otherwise; inspiration.’ Cicero’s literalising of inspiration as being blown upon by a divine wind (De Natura Deorum).  Paradise Lost, .–.  Kenner, Pound Era, p. .

Blood for the Ghosts             



C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious (; New York, ), p. . Pound, ‘Canto XLVII’, Cantos, p. . Ibid., p. . ‘Introduction to Savonarola: A Dramatic Poem, by Charlotte Eliot’ (), Prose II, p. . The Letters of Ezra Pound, p. . Kenner, ‘Blood for the Ghosts’, pp. , . Adam Nicolson, The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters (London, ), pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ronald Bush, ‘The Cantos: The Ur-Cantos’, in Demetres Tryphonopoulos and Stephen Adams (eds.), The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia (Westport, ), p. . Kenner, Pound Era, p. . A. D. Moody, Tracing T. S. Eliot’s Spirit (Cambridge, ), p. . Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, p. . Ezra Pound, Selected Poems, ed. and introduction by T. S. Eliot (London, ), p. .

Afterword

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

Paul Valéry wrote, in his volume of essays introduced by Eliot in , that ‘there is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography.’ Fragmentation was a persistent characteristic of Eliot’s mental landscape, as his ongoing neuroses attest, as well as of his poetic and critical methods. James Longenbach has pointed out Eliot’s revealing repetition between  and  of the phrase ‘Ainsi tout leur a craqué dans la main’ (‘So everything has come to pieces in their hands’) from Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet (), first in relation to Balzac, then in relation to Gray and Collins in his  essay on Marvell. Longenbach suggests that its ‘syntax infected Eliot’s way of thinking’. In ‘Andrew Marvell’, the phrase appears as Eliot struggles to articulate the ‘unknown quality’ of ‘great imaginative power’ evident in Marvell, an ability ‘to gather up and to digest into its art all the experience of the human mind’: Gray and Collins . . . had lost that hold on human values, that firm grasp of human experience, which is a formidable achievement of the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets. This wisdom, cynical perhaps but untired (in Shakespeare, a terrifying clairvoyance), leads toward, and is only completed by, the religious comprehension; it leads to the point of the ‘Ainsi tout leur a craqué dans la main’ of Bouvard and Pecuchet.

As he worked at the question of how poetry comes about, Eliot gradually revealed a concept of poetic creation with surprising affinities to what we can call by way of shorthand ‘Romantic Imagination’, both as expressed by Coleridge and Keats and as filtered through later movements in literature and psychology. Intuited rather than logically derived, Eliot’s process of poetic creation was a radical exercise in humility, passivity, and 

Afterword



uncertainty. In concordance with his own temperamental and metaphysical predilections, Eliot’s imaginative kinship with Coleridge’s haunted shade was complicated by his yearning for – and striving towards – a form of religious comprehension he associated with the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets, and later Baudelaire and Laforgue. Despite his resistance to the idea of Romantic inspiration (as in Edward Young’s humanist formulation of the ‘god within’), Eliot quotes with approval Coleridge’s indicia of poetic Imagination, in ‘Andrew Marvell’: This power . . . reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement . . . 

John Spencer Hill attributes the same qualities to ‘Dejection: An Ode’, describing it as ‘a poem of paradox, of balanced opposites – the formal and the informal, imaginative loss and imaginative power – held in delicate equilibrium.’ In his Norton Lecture on ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge’, Eliot picks up the ambivalent interplay of fear and inspiration in Coleridge’s sense of visitation by a spirit not entirely benign. The last lines of the epigraph to ‘Dejection’ (‘And I fear, I fear, my Master dear! / We shall have a deadly storm’) signal the slippage between creative and destructive power. Yet in elaborating his sense of the compulsive urge to create poetry, Eliot – in this rare instance – does not follow Coleridge into a language of elemental forces. Instead, he quotes a line from André Gide’s Le Prométhée mal enchaîné () – ‘Il faut avoir un aigle ’, concluding: ‘Coleridge remained in contact with his eagle’ (UP –). It is revealing that Eliot chose so freely to fix the visitant as an eagle, faced with Coleridge’s own refusal to set a face on his creative power (in the poem it remains resolutely a ‘shaping spirit’, never itself taking shape). In Gide’s rendering, the eagle feeds parasitically on Prometheus, who welcomes its ravages as he grows more wasted. The eagle (grown strong) is able to carry away the waif-like Prometheus, freeing him from his prison cell. It is a most ambiguous metaphor for the liberating yet cruelly persistent impetus towards (and process of ) poetic composition. It is typical of Eliot’s highly precise yet fluid imagination that he evokes an image as complex and decontextualised as the classical Promethean eagle, encountered via Gide, then never refers to it in his criticism again.



Afterword

In touching on, then abandoning, both the Promethean eagle and its more benevolent counterpart the Muse, Eliot acknowledges the traditional, mythological resources for speaking about creative power, but implies their general communicative and imaginative failure in relation to his own work. The eagle, imbricated in layers of cerebral Gidian allusion, is wholly at odds with the organic metaphors that seethe and shimmer beneath Eliot’s critical and poetic surface. Randall Jarrell intuited this about Eliot, writing in : Won’t the future say to us in helpless astonishment: ‘But did you actually believe that all those things about objective correlations, Classicism, the tradition, applied to his poetry? Surely you must have seen that he was one of the most subjective and daemonic poets who ever lived, the victim and helpless beneficiary of his own inexorable compulsions, obsessions? . . . But for you, of course, after the first few years, his poetry existed undersea, thousands of feet below the deluge of exegesis, explication, source listing, scholarship and criticism that overwhelmed it. And yet how bravely and personally it survived, its eyes neither coral nor mother-of-pearl but plainly human, full of human anguish!’

Eliot’s conjunction of Gide’s image and Coleridge, and separately of Coleridge with Marvell, Baudelaire, and Laforgue, suggests a need to reconcile three paradigms of literary creation, each of which in some measure attains ‘the direct experience, the immediate contact’ with feeling ingathered and transmuted into art. Out of the dissociated rubble of the eighteenth century – and his own – Eliot sought to regain a ‘grasp of human experience’, drawing a tripartite relationship between the religious comprehension of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, Coleridgean Romanticism, and the sensual cynicism of the French postRomantic tradition exemplified by Flaubert, Valéry, Gide, Baudelaire, and Laforgue. In folding these poetic antecedents in a single party, Eliot releases another compound ghost, an act gestured towards in the essay’s conclusion, which speaks to describe Marvell (and those like him) with Baudelaire’s voice: ‘C’était une belle âme, comme on ne fait plus à Londres.’ In , after the effective end of his productive life as a poet, Eliot gave an address (On Poetry) to the students of Concord Academy, Massachusetts, in which he returns to the confessional idiom of his  Norton Lectures and implicitly recalls his kinship with ‘the sad ghost of Coleridge’ (UP ), summoned to endure in common the dwindling of creative power:

Afterword



I have always been haunted by one or the other of two doubts. The first is, that nothing I have written is really of permanent value . . . But the second doubt is still more distressing. I sometimes feel that some, at least, of what I have written, is very good, but that I shall never again write anything good. Some imp always whispers to me, as I am struggling to get down to any new piece of work, that this is going to be lamentably bad, and that I won’t know it. At least three times during my life, and for periods of some duration, I have been convinced that I shall never again be able to write anything worth reading. And perhaps this time it is true . . . Whether this is true for all artists I cannot say: but I am sure that for a poet humility is the most essential virtue. That means, not to be influenced by the desire for applause, not to be influenced by the desire to excel anybody else, not to be influenced by what your readers expect of you, not to write something merely because it is high time you wrote something, but to wait patiently, not caring how you compare with other poets, for the impulse which you cannot resist . . . 

Eliot’s poignant confession – combined with his concluding comments in the Norton Lectures – reveal the extent to which his imagining of the processes (and failure) of poetic creation redound to an uncanny, as well as elemental, framework of metaphor. Coleridge’s rendering of poetic creation in ‘The Eolian Harp’ (): O the one Life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, A light in sound, a sound-like power in light, Rhythm in all thought . . . 

is matched in Eliot’s vision of Shakespeare as the ideal poet, who ‘has found his way into . . . strange lands of more than polar darkness and more than equatorial light, . . . has progressed into a world into which we cannot follow him.’ Light – Dantean, Miltonic, interstellar –finds its place in Eliot’s dynamic language of poetic creation, interwoven with the water forces of The Tempest, with its Shakespearean sea music, heights, and depths. These processes are always submerged, their operation always obscured beneath layers of psychological and cultural accruals (hence Eliot’s view that ‘the essential advantage for a poet . . . is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory’) (UP ). In their fullest realisation, they tend towards a consummate silence: the poet, ‘like a comet continuing its course away from the earth . . . should gradually disappear into his private mystery.’ The state of indeterminacy in Keats’s ‘negative capability’ is echoed in Eliot’s critical formulation of ‘the depths of feeling into which we cannot



Afterword

peer’ (UP ). Coleridge’s poetic account of poets as passive vessels (‘organic Harps diversely fram’d, / That tremble into thought’) conflates the Classical inspiration of afflatus with the Christian divine breath of Pentecost. Eliot’s ‘wind / That blows before and after time’ and ‘communication / Of the dead . . . tongued with fire beyond the language of the living’ forges the same compound as Coleridge’s ‘vast . . . intellectual breeze, / At once the Soul of each, and God of all’, eliding the ‘shaping spirit’ with the Holy Spirit. Although he reacted against the Arnoldian substitution of poetry for religion, there is a strong echo of divine darkness in Eliot’s poetic resignation ‘to wait patiently . . . for the impulse which you cannot resist’. Much of Eliot’s critical and poetic reckoning with his poetic masters was an attempt to arrive at a state of creative and personal ‘balance and unity’, a psycho-poetic entelechy. His criticism betrays a consciousness of the interconnections between psychological and creative selfactualisation and reintegration: ‘Sometimes a critic may choose an author to criticise . . . [with] a personality which has actualised all that has been suppressed in himself’ (UP ). This process went beyond theatrical mask-play, trespassing into the supernatural. Eliot’s was a haunted process of composition (‘Some imp always whispers to me’), in which the presence of the dead is a necessary precondition of creation. Even as a critic, Eliot felt that the best criticism is enriched by a form of literary possession: ‘the critic assumes . . . the personality of the author he criticises, and through this personality is able to speak with his own voice’ (UP ). The critic, and the dead author he criticises, each find ‘words [they] never thought to speak’ in the process of resurrection: ‘To bring the poet back to life – the great, the perennial, task of criticism’. Eliot published ‘A Note on War Poetry’ one month after ‘Little Gidding’. Despite his injunction to poets ‘to accept the outside invitation just as a job to be done without worrying whether it is to be poetry or not’, Eliot used the opportunity of a commission (to provide a poem for inclusion in a book by Storm Jameson, London Calling) to continue his enquiry into the nature ‘Of forces beyond control by experiment’. The poem demurs from a focus on the experiences of the individual as alternately too petty or overwhelming. Emotions are only ‘incidents’, which, without some principle of metamorphosis, are either subsumed or dispersed. Patterns of movement – containment and diffusion, continuity and change – permeate this late poem and shape its attempts to affirm ‘in verse’ the poet’s efforts to unite and transmute fragmentary experience into more universal meaning. Like all Eliot’s ruminations on the process of



Afterword

poetic creation, the poem is attended by multiple presences. The poetic voice is doubled. The ‘we’ is the poet, speaking perhaps to himself, as well as in complicit understanding with the reader. But the poem admits the ghosts of other, earlier poets, drawn from the darkness to another encounter by the light and heat of one of Eliot’s last acts of purely poetic creation: Where is the point at which the merely individual Explosion breaks To create the universal, originate a symbol Out of the impact? This is a meeting On which we attend . . . (P )

Notes  Charles Baudelaire, ‘Correspondances’ (), in The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (; Oxford, ), p. . ‘Like long echoes transfused from afar / In a dark and profound unity, / Vast as the night and like day’s clarity, / The fragrances, the colours and the sounds answer’ (my translation).  Valéry, The Art of Poetry, p. .  ‘Beyle and Balzac: A Review of A History of the French Novel, to the Close of the Nineteenth Century, vol. II, by George Saintsbury’ (), Prose II, p. .  James Longenbach, ‘“Mature Poets Steal”: Eliot’s Allusive Practice’, in A. D. Moody (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (; Cambridge, ), p. .  ‘Andrew Marvell’ (), Prose II, pp. , , .  Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (London, ), p. . Drawing on Seneca’s ‘Sacer nobis inest Deus’ (‘Divinity dwells within us’).  ‘Andrew Marvell’, Prose II, p. .  John Spencer Hill, A Coleridge Companion: An Introduction to the Major Poems and the Biographia Literaria (London, ), p. .  Although several of Eliot’s poems do contain related images: the ‘agéd eagle’ of Ash-Wednesday, and the exclamation by the diner in ‘Dans le Restaurant’ (): ‘Mais alors, tu as ton vautour!’ (‘“What? You have your vulture as well!”’, in Moody’s translation), A. D. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Poet (Cambridge, ), p. . Gardner suggests that the draft of Part Four of ‘East Coker’ references Le Prométhée mal enchaîné with its banker and millionaire: Gardner, Composition of Four Quartets, pp. –. The ‘ruined’ millionaire brings the passage in ‘East Coker’ into semantic relation with Eliot’s critical comments on Coleridge.  Randall Jarrell, ‘Fifty Years of American Poetry’, in The Third Book of Criticism (New York, ), pp. –. Jarrell had planned to write a study of Eliot titled ‘T. S. Eliot and Obsessional Neurosis’. See Mark Ford,



                 

Afterword

‘Door Closing! Review of Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy, by Randall Jarrell’, London Review of Books / ( Oct. ), . ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, OPP, p. . ‘Andrew Marvell’, Prose II, p. . ‘It was a beautiful soul, such as one no longer finds in London.’ ‘Andrew Marvell’, Prose II, p. . On Poetry: An Address (Concord, ), pp. –. Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’, in Complete Poems, p. . Prose V, p. . Ibid., p. . Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’, p. . ‘Burnt Norton’, P . ‘Little Gidding’, P . In ‘Matthew Arnold’, Eliot writes, ‘For Arnold, the best poetry supersedes both religion and philosophy’. Eliot refers to the ‘deplorable’ effects of using poetry as ‘a substitute for religious faith’. Prose IV, pp. , . On Poetry, pp. –. Compare ‘Dejection: An Ode’: ‘But to be still and patient, all I can’. Coleridge, Complete Poems, p. . Vittoz, Neurasthenia, p. . On Poetry, pp. –. ‘Little Gidding’, P . ‘Andrew Marvell’, Prose II, p. . See Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, p. . On Poetry, p. .

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Index

aboulie, , ,  Abrams, M. H.,  Ackroyd, Peter,  Adams, Henry, ,  Adler, Alfred,  aesthetics, , , –, , ,  aether, ,  afterlife, ,  agriculture, metaphors of,  Aiken, Conrad, , ,  Albright, Daniel, , , , ,  Aldington, Richard, ,  allusion limits of,  as meaning,  as musical pattern, ,  as the uncanny,  ‘The Altar of the Dead’ (James), – Anabasis (St.-John Perse),  ‘Andrew Marvell’ (Eliot), – animals, metaphors of, – ‘Animula’ (Eliot), ,  Anthony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), ,  anthropology, , , , –,  anti-semitism, – The Anxiety of Influence (Bloom),  apophrades (return of the dead), ,  aposiopesis,  archaeology, metaphors of,  archetypes,  Arnold, Matthew, , , – art and science, , – theories of,  The Art of Poetry (Valéry),  Ash-Wednesday (Eliot) inward turn,  sea as metaphor, , – stillness,  twilight, , – vision, , 

assonance,  astronomy, , , , –,  astrophysics, , ,  Athenaeum,  atomic vortex,  atoms dance of atoms in brain,  empty atoms,  fractured atoms, –,  music,  nuclear theory,  porosity, ,  and stars, , – auditory imagination, , , , – Auerbach, Erich,  Baudelaire, Charles, , , – Bay-Petersen, Ole,  Beckett, Samuel, ,  Beddoes, Thomas Lovell,  Beer, Gillian, , , , ,  bees, metaphors of, – Belgion, Montgomery, –,  Bell, Ian F. A.,  Bell, Michael,  ‘Ben Jonson’ (Eliot), – Bergson, Henri,  Berkeley, Bishop George, – Bertran and Bini (Kipling),  biological metaphors, ,  Blanton, C. D., – Blaue Blume (Novalis),  blood ‘Burnt Norton’,  ‘East Coker’, – The Family Reunion,  ‘Marina’,  nekuia (insanguination of the dead), –, , –,  Pericles,  Pound, , , 





Index

blood (cont.) The Waste Land,  Bloom, Harold, ,  blue, , ,  body death, , –, ,  identity,  psychology,  sacrament,  time and space,  visions of light,  bones, , –, , , ,  Bradley, F. H., , – Braithwaite, R. B.,  Brocken Spectre, phenomenon of,  Brooker, Jewel Spears,  Brown, Sarah Annes,  Browning, Robert,  Brücke, Ernst Wilhelm von,  ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ (Eliot), , ,  ‘The Buried Life’ (Arnold),  ‘The Burnt Dancer’ (Eliot), , ,  ‘Burnt Norton’ (Eliot) astronomical metaphors, ,  consciousness,  creative illness,  doubles and ghosts,  Eliot and Shakespeare,  fragmentary method of composition,  hidden music,  light and darkness, , , – past and present,  patterns, –,  poetic creation, – stillness and silence, –, ,  vision as metaphor, – voices and language,  water as metaphor,  Bush, Ronald, , –,  Butler, Samuel,  cactus, metaphors of, – Campbell, Thomas,  The Cantos (Pound), , –, – Cartesian rationalism,  Cascade Gardens, Louisiana Purchase Exposition,  Celtic Twilight,  cerebral cortex,  Chabaneau, Camille,  chemical metaphors, – childhood imagination,  Chilton, Neil,  ‘Choruses from The Rock ’ (Eliot)

Eliot and Whitehead,  light, , , –,  sea, , , –,  silence and stillness,  stone,  Christian Mysticism (Inge),  Christianity,  clairvoyance, ,  Clark Lectures (Eliot), , , ,  classicisation,  The Cloud (Shelley),  The Cocktail Party (Eliot), , , – cognition, , –,  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’,  creative illness,  ‘Dejection: An Ode’,  ‘The Eolian Harp’, ,  Kubla Khan,  on Othello,  poetic creation, – power of the Muse,  Rime of the Ancient Mariner,  sea as metaphor,  Shakespeare scholarship,  swarm as metaphor,  vision as metaphor, – colour categorisation,  theories, , –, – vision, ,  Colour and Meaning (Gage),  concentration,  The Concept of Nature (Whitehead),  The Confidential Clerk (Eliot),  Conrad, Joseph, , , –,  consciousness, –, –, , , ,  ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’ (Coleridge),  Cook, Eleanor,  Corcoran, Neil on ‘Coriolan’,  Eliot and Shakespeare, , –,  Eliot conversion,  on ‘Little Gidding’,  on ‘Marina’, ,  Shakespeare and the Modern Poet,  ‘Coriolan’ (Eliot),  Coriolanus (Shakespeare), –, ,  cosmology, , , , –,  Crawford, Robert, , , , , , ,  creative illness, , – creativity, –, , See also poetic creation The Criterion (magazine), –, , –, , ,  Critic as Scientist (Bell), 

Index criticism (literary) exegesis,  as ghostly possession,  source-hunting,  Victorian psycho-biography, – Cuda, Anthony,  Cuthbert, Alan,  dance, metaphors of, – ‘Dans le Restaurant’ (Eliot),  Dante Eliot’s comparison with Shakespeare, –, – Inferno, ,  light as metaphor, , , ,  Paradiso,  Pound’s Cantos,  Purgatorio, , , , ,  ‘Dante’ (Eliot), , , ,  dark angel, –,  dark embryo, –, –, , , – dark psychic material, –,  darkness, , , , , , –, – Darwin, Charles, , , , , –,  Darwin, Robert Waring, – Darwinism, , – De Quincey, Thomas,  death Ash-Wednesday,  Bloom,  Conrad,  Eliot, –, , , – Hamlet,  hollowness, ,  James,  ‘Little Gidding’, – poetic creation, – Porter on Jung,  Pound’s Cantos, – Tennyson, – The Waste Land,  ‘Whispers of Immortality’,  ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ (Eliot),  dédoublement,  degeneration, – ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (Coleridge),  demon, , ,  The Demon of the Absolute (More),  depth psychology, , , , , , ,  depth, metaphors of Eliot, , , , , , , , , , – Pound,  sea as metaphor, , 



Shakespeare, –, , , ,  Tennyson,  Descartes, René,  Descent of Man (Darwin),  desert, metaphors of, – destructive element,  ‘The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse’ (Eliot lectures), , , – The Dial,  Dickinson, Emily,  Dido and Æneas (Purcell),  Dioptrics (Descartes),  ‘Dirge’ (Eliot), , , – dissociation, , ,  dissolution, , , , , , –, , –, – ‘Dissolving Views’ (Sullivan),  Divus, Andreas,  Dobrée, Bonamy, ,  ‘Doctor Graesler’ (Schnitzler),  Donne, John, , , , , , ,  Der Doppelgänger (Schubert),  doppelgängers. See also doubles; duality The Cocktail Party, – doubled self, , , – Eliot and James,  embryo,  gender,  in literature,  ‘Little Gidding’,  Milton Academy Address,  optical images,  shadow metaphor,  ‘To Walter de la Mare’,  ‘Doris’s Dream Songs’ (Eliot),  doubles. See also doppelgängers; duality The Cocktail Party, – The Confidential Clerk,  dark doubles, ,  doubled self, , –, – The Elder Statesman,  gender,  ‘Little Gidding’,  Miller, ,  Milton Academy Address, – Warner,  Doubles (Miller), ,  Dowden, Edward, , , –, ,  Dowson, Ernest,  drama,  dreams, ,  ‘The Dry Salvages’ (Eliot) death, – evolution and transformation, – inward turn, 



Index

‘The Dry Salvages’ (Eliot) (cont.) light and darkness, –,  lightning, – river, – sea, , , , , , –, –, – and Shakespeare, , , ,  voyage,  duality, , , , , See also doppelgängers; doubles Durrell, Lawrence,  dusk, , –, , , , See also twilight ‘East Coker’ (Eliot) creative illness,  doubled self,  forest sages,  Four Quartets cycle,  light and darkness, , , –, – nekuia (insanguination of the dead), – sea, , , – and Shakespeare, – vacant interstellar spaces, ,  Ebury, Katherine,  Eddington, Arthur atoms in brain, – The Expanding Universe, ,  mentalism, – The Nature of the Physical World, , , – New Pathways in Science,  new physics, –,  relativity,  science and theology,  scientific and literary discourses, – space and time, – Space, Time and Gravitation, , – stars and atoms, ,  Stars and Atoms, , – vision and sight, –, ,  Edel, Leon,  ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex’ (Eliot),  ego, ,  Einstein, Albert, –, –, ,  Einstein’s Wake (Whitworth), ,  The Elder Statesman (Eliot), ,  Eliot, George,  Eliot, T. S. See also under individual works on Adams,  astronomical metaphors, – auditory imagination, , , , – Bergsonism,  chemical metaphors,  Christian conversion,  Clark Lectures, , , , 

colour vision, – creative illness, – criticism, –, –, , –, ,  Dante, ,  dark embryo, –, , – dark psychic material, – Darwinian evolutionism, – depth psychology, –,  desert metaphors, – Donne, –,  doubled self, –, – and Dowden,  Eddington, – eyes and vision, –, ,  fragmentary method of composition, , –,  Frazer, ,  functions of metaphor, – germ of poem, – ghost metaphors, –, –, – on Hamlet,  imaginative dynamics,  impersonality,  inward turn,  and James, –, , – Jonson, – Knight,  light as metaphor, , , , , , – ‘Light Invisible’, , – literary paradigms, – mentalism and perception, – metaphoric practice, –,  metic (resident alien),  mind and consciousness,  musical patterns,  new physics, , –,  Norton Lectures, –, , , –,  past lives of language,  patterns, –, –, , – poetic creation, –, , – poetic personality,  power of the Muse,  primitive humanity, synecdoche for, – psychological therapy, –, –,  psychology, – recurrent metaphors of creation, – river as metaphor,  Romanticism, –, , – science and theology, – scientific and literary discourses, – sea as metaphor, , –, , –, , –, , ,  sea-voices,  Shakespeare classicisation, – Shakespeare Lectures, , , –

Index Shakespeare scholarship, – Shakespeare, influence of, , – Shakespearean language, , –,  silence and stillness, – soundscapes,  space as metaphor, –, –, –, – splitting and reunification, – stone as metaphor,  on The Tempest, –, –, –, –,  on Twain,  twilight, , –,  on Valéry, – Vaughan,  vision as metaphor, –, –,  Whitehead, – Wundt,  Eliot, Vivienne,  Eliot’s Dark Angel (Schuchard),  Ellis, Steve,  embryo, –, – emotions, , ,  Empson, William, , – The Enemy (Lewis),  energic causation, ,  entropy, – ‘The Eolian Harp’ (Coleridge), ,  Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (Berkeley),  Euclid,  Everdell, William, ,  evolution, , , , , – The Expanding Universe (Eddington), ,  ‘Experiment in Criticism’ (Eliot),  The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Darwin),  Expressivism, –,  eyes Berkeley, – colour vision, – Darwin Snr., – ‘Dirge’,  ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex’,  The Hollow Men,  light, , ,  peripheral vision and poetic influence,  physiology of sight,  primitive humanity, synecdoche for, ,  Purkinje, – scientific discovery, , – sightlessness, ,  visual perception, – The Family Reunion (Eliot) doubleness, –



ghosts, , , , , ,  light, –,  Spring rebirth, ,  Fantastic Metamorphoses (Warner),  ‘La Figlia Che Piange’ (Eliot), ,  The Figure in the Carpet (James), ,  ‘The Fire Sermon’ (Eliot), ,  The First Moderns (Everdell),  Flaubert, Gustave, ,  Fleay, Frederick,  Four Quartets (Eliot) doubles,  Eliot and Shakespeare, , –, ,  ghosts,  light, , ,  mentalism,  poetic creation, ,  polyvocality,  sea,  Fowler, Alistair,  fractured atoms, –,  fragments, –, , –,  Frankenstein (Shelley),  Franklin, George, – Frazer, James, , , –, , ,  French Symbolists, – Freud, Sigmund, , , –, ,  ‘The Friends of the Friends’ (James), – ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ (Eliot),  Furnivall, Frederick,  Futurism,  Gage, John, ,  Garber, Marjorie,  Gardner, Helen,  gastronomical metaphors, – genius,  geometry, –, ,  germ of poem, – ‘Gerontion’ (Eliot), –, , , , ,  gestalt, –,  ghosts doubles,  The Elder Statesman,  Eliot Milton Academy Address,  The Family Reunion,  Four Quartets,  Hamlet, – The Hollow Men, ,  James, – ‘Little Gidding’, –, , , , – ‘Marina’,  nekuia (insanguination of the dead),  Pound, 



Index

ghosts (cont.) The Waste Land,  Wilamowitz-Moellendorff,  Gide, André, – Giraud, Albert,  Goethe, J. W. von, , –,  Gold, Matthew K., ,  The Golden Bough (Frazer), , , ,  Gordon, Lyndall, ,  Götterdämmerung (Wagner),  grace,  Grady, Hugh,  Grammars of Creation (Steiner), – hallucinations, ,  Halpern, Richard,  Hamlet (Shakespeare), , , , , , , – ‘Hamlet and His Problems’ (Eliot), –,  Handbook of Physiological Optics (Helmholtz),  The Happy Prince (Wilde),  Harding, Jason, , ,  Hardy, Thomas,  Harris, Amanda, ,  Hawthorne (James),  Hayward, John,  Heaney, Seamus,  Heart of Darkness (Conrad), – Hecht, Selig,  Heine, Heinrich,  Hell,  Helmholtz, Hermann von, –, –, ,  Henry IV (Shakespeare),  l’heure bleue,  hidden music, , ,  hidden self, – Hill, John Spencer,  ‘Histrion’ (Pound),  Hofstadter, Douglas R.,  Hogg, James, ,  Holder, Alan,  The Hollow Men (Eliot), , , , –, ,  hollowness, , ,  homeostasis,  Homer, –, , – Hopkins, Gerard Manley, – Huckleberry Finn (Twain),  Hügel, Baron von, – Hughes, Ted,  Hulme, T. E., ,  Hutton, James,  Huxley, Julian, 

Huxley, Thomas,  Huygens, Christian,  ‘Hymn of the Nativity’ (Milton),  idealism, , , –,  illumination, , , , ,  imagination auditory, , , , – childhood,  dynamics of, –, , , , , ,  literary, , , –, , , ,  mythic,  Romantic, ,  vision, –, ,  imitation,  immersion, , , , –, ,  In Memoriam (Tennyson),  Inferno (Dante), ,  Inge, Dean William Ralph, , ,  inheritance, literary, , , ,  The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud),  interstellar spaces, –, , , , ,  introspection, , ,  invisible light, , – Jain, Manju,  James, Henry ‘The Altar of the Dead’, – clairvoyance,  doubled self, – and Eliot, , –, –, ,  The Figure in the Carpet, ,  ‘The Friends of the Friends’, – ghosts as metaphor, – hidden music,  ‘The Jolly Corner’, – poetic creation, ,  sea as metaphor,  on Shakespeare, , –, , –, , ,  The Turn of the Screw,  James, William, ,  Jameson, Storm,  Janet, Pierre, ,  Jarrell, Randall,  Jeans, Sir James, , –,  Jefferies, Richard,  Jewishness,  ‘John Marston’ (Eliot),  Johnson, Julie M.,  Johnson, Lionel, ,  Johnson, Mark,  Johnson, Samuel,  ‘The Jolly Corner’ (James), – Jonson, Ben, –, 

Index ‘Journey of the Magi’ (Eliot),  Joyce, James, , , ,  Jung, C. G. archetypes,  creative illness, , – depth psychology, , – nekuia (insanguination of the dead),  Porter, – psychic energy, ,  psychological therapy,  katabasis (descent into underworld), ,  Keats, John, –, , ,  Kenner, Hugh, –, , –, – Kermode, Frank, , , –, , – King Lear (Shakespeare), , ,  Kintsch, Walter,  Kipling, Rudyard,  Kirk, Russell,  knowledge, , , , , , –, , , ,  Kubla Khan (Coleridge),  Kuhn, Thomas,  Laforgue, Jules, , – Lakoff, George, – Landscapes (Eliot), , – Lang, Andrew,  Langfeld, Herbert Sidney,  language functions of metaphor, – history and development, –,  polyvocality,  Shakespeare’s, , , , –,  Lawrence, D. H.,  Lee, Sidney,  Lefebvre, Henriette,  Leibniz, G. W.,  Letter I (Empson),  Levenson, Michael,  Lévy-Brühl, Lucien, , – Lewis, Wyndham,  light conceptions of,  Conrad, – creative illness, – Eddington,  fading and dying stars,  Four Quartets,  ‘Light Invisible’, , – literary criticism,  luminescence, , ,  peripheral vision and poetic influence,  poetic creation, ,  role in colour vision, , –, 



solar death, – space,  speed of light,  spiritual constant, – sunlight, – twilight, , , –,  Vaughan,  vision, , ,  white light,  World’s Fair, – lightning, – literary criticism exegesis,  as ghostly possession,  source-hunting,  Victorian psycho-biography, – ‘Little Gidding’ (Eliot) astronomical metaphors, – doubles, –,  ghosts, –, , , – light, –, , , – poetic creation, ,  sea, –, – voices and language, – Little Review,  Lobachevsky, Nikolai,  Lobb, Edward,  London Calling (Jameson),  Longenbach, James,  Loosmore, W. Charles,  Lord Jim (Conrad),  ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (Eliot), , , , , –, , ,  Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare),  Loving Faster than Light (Price),  Lowes, John Livingston, – Lyell, Charles, ,  Macbeth (Shakespeare),  Macfarlane, Robert, –,  MacMurray, John,  Maddrey, Joseph,  The Making of T. S. Eliot (Maddrey),  Mallarmé, Stéphane,  Malone, Edmond,  Manganaro, Marc,  ‘Marina’ (Eliot), , , –, –, –, , , – maritime metaphors, –, , ,  Marvell, Andrew, ,  materialism, , , , ,  The Mathematical Theory of Relativity (Eddington),  matter, , , , , , , –, , , –, , 



Index

Matthews, Steven,  Maupassant, Guy de,  Mauron, Charles, ,  Maxwell, James Clerk, ,  McDonald, Russ,  mechanistic causation, ,  memory, –, , ,  mentalism, , – metalepsis,  metamorphosis, –, , , –, ,  metaphor as conduit for language, – context and resonance,  creation and invention, , – Eliot and Shakespeare, , ,  etymology of,  functions of, – Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson),  metaphysical poetry,  ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (Eliot),  metaphysics, , , ,  metre,  A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), , , , ,  Miller, Karl, , ,  Milton, John, , ,  Milton Academy, – ‘Milton I’ (Eliot),  mimesis, – mind awareness,  creative potential,  Frazer,  ghosts,  and matter, ,  mentalism, , – and metaphor,  of poet, , , –, – and orbit, – psychology, , –, , – unconscious, , ,  universal mind, ,  vision, ,  waves,  Minkowski, Hermann, ,  The Mirror and the Lamp (Abrams),  mirrors,  modernism, –, , , , , –, , ,  Modernism and Cosmology (Ebury),  Monro, Harold, – Monroe, Harriet,  Moody, David,  moonlight,  Moore, Marianne, , 

More, Paul Elmer, – Morley, Frank,  Morrell, Ottoline, ,  Morris, William,  Mower, Edgar Ansel,  ‘Mr. Apollinax’ (Eliot), – ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ (Eliot),  Mundus Mare (Donne),  Münsterberg, Hugo,  Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot), , , ,  Murry, John Middleton, ,  Muse, ,  music creative illness,  Eliot and Shakespeare, , , , –, –, – hidden music, , ,  music of poetry, , ,  musical atom,  musical pattern of sound, , ,  Pound on,  Romeo and Juliet,  sea as metaphor, – sea-voices, ,  Shakespeare scholarship,  Shakespearean language,  Shakespearean songs,  submarine, , , , –, –, ,  ‘The Music of Poetry’ (Eliot), , , ,  The Mysterious Universe (Jeans), ,  mysticism, , , ,  Mysticism (Underhill),  natural selection,  nature, ,  The Nature of the Physical World (Eddington), , , – negative capability, , , ,  nekuia (insanguination of the dead), , – nerves, , , , ,  neurasthenia, , , ,  neuroses, , ,  New Approaches to Ezra Pound (Kenner),  ‘The New Götterdämmerung’ (Inge),  ‘New Hampshire’ (Eliot),  New Pathways in Science (Eddington),  new physics, –, , ,  The New Poetic (Stead), ,  Newton, Isaac, ,  Nicolson, Adam,  Nietzsche, Friedrich,  non-Euclidean geometry, , ,  Norton Lectures (Eliot), –, , , –, 

Index ‘A Note on War Poetry’ (Eliot),  Novalis,  nuclear physics,  Nuttall, A. D., , – oceanscape, ,  The Odyssey (Homer), –,  ‘Oh little voices of the throats of men’ (Eliot),  ‘On Being Ill’ (Woolf ), ,  ‘On Poetry’ (Eliot), – ‘On Reading Einstein’ (Mauron),  On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again (Keats),  Open Fields (Beer), ,  ophthalmoscope,  optical illusions, ,  optics,  organic metaphors,  The Origin of Species (Darwin), ,  Original Copy (Macfarlane),  originality,  Othello (Shakespeare), , ,  Owen, Wilfred,  Paradise Lost (Milton),  Paradiso (Dante),  Parry, Milman,  particle metaphors, – past and present, , ,  Pasternak, Boris,  patterns Eliot and Shakespeare, –, , – Four Quartets, – James,  literary meaning, ,  music of poetry,  musical pattern of sound, , ,  pattern in the carpet, ,  Shakespeare scholarship, – transformation, – pearls, –, , , , , , , ,  ‘The Pensées of Pascal’ (Eliot), – perception, , –, – Pericles (Shakespeare), , , , –, ,  Personae (Pound),  personality, –, – phantasmagoria,  philosophy, , , ,  physics ‘Gerontion’, – heat and light,  light and space, , ,  new physics, –, – recurrent metaphors of creation, 



relativity,  scientific and literary discourses,  vision and sight, ,  Pierrot lunaire (Giraud),  Piette, Adam,  Pisan Cantos (Pound),  plagiarism,  poetic creation artistic personality,  Bergson,  Coleridge,  creation and invention, – creative illness,  dark embryo,  Eliot and language of the past,  Eliot and Shakespeare, , , –, , –, –, ,  Eliot on contemporary poetry,  energic/mechanistic causation, ,  fragmentary method of composition, – genius and creation,  germ of poem, – internal alchemy, – light and space, , , ,  literary paradigms, – living mystery,  meanings, ,  metaphoric practice, ,  past lives of language,  poetic vision, ,  Promethean eagle, – recombinant theories,  recurrent metaphors of creation, – resonance to historical moment,  river as metaphor,  Romantic language, – scientific and literary discourses, – sea as metaphor, –, –, ,  Shakespearean language, – Shelley and Wordsworth, – ‘The Poetic Drama’ (Eliot),  ‘Poetry and Propaganda’ (Eliot),  The Poetry of Thought (Steiner),  Poincaré, Henri, , ,  polyvocality, , –, , – porosity, –, ,  Porter, Alan, –,  ‘Portrait of a Lady’ (Eliot), ,  postmodernism,  Pound, Ezra The Cantos, , –, – ‘The Dry Salvages’, – and Eliot,  ‘Histrion’,  ‘Little Gidding’, –



Index

Quantum Poetics (Albright),  quantum theory, , 

The Return (Pound),  ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ (Eliot),  rhythm auditory imagination, , , ,  dancing,  of the dead, , – history of language,  incantation,  and metaphor,  music, , ,  of river, – of sea, , , , ,  Shakespeare, , , ,  stillness,  Richard III (Shakespeare), ,  Richards, I. A.,  Richter, Jean Paul,  Ricks, Christopher, , , , , , , ,  Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge),  river, metaphors of, – The Road to Xanadu (Lowes),  Robert, Étienne-Gaspard,  Robertson, J. M., – Romanticism Berkeley,  Eliot on,  light and colour, , –,  poetic creation, , – Romantic Inspiration, – Shakespeare,  Shelley and Wordsworth,  Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare),  Royce, Josiah,  The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (FitzGerald),  Ruskin, John,  Russell, Bertrand, ,  Russell, George,  Rutherford, Ernest, 

Racine, Jean,  rainbow,  Rainey, Lawrence,  rationalism,  Read, Herbert, , , , – rebirth,  recombinant theories,  ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’ (Eliot),  ‘Reflections on Vers Libre ’ (Eliot), ,  relativity, –, –,  religion, , –, , ,  Religion in the Making (Whitehead), – religious physics, , ,  resonance, , ,  resurrection, , 

Sacks, Oliver,  saturation, , –, , , ,  ‘A Sceptical Patrician’ (Eliot),  scepticism,  Schaffer, Simon,  Schnitzler, Arthur,  Schuchard, Ronald, , ,  science and art, , – Eliot on, – and literature, , , – new physics, – revisionism, – scientific and literary discourses, – scientific metaphors, 

Pound, Ezra (cont.) nekuia (insanguination of the dead), – new physics, ,  originality,  past lives of language, ,  Personae,  Pisan Cantos,  poetic creation, ,  scientific and literary discourses,  sea as metaphor,  pre-history,  ‘Preludes’ (Eliot), ,  Price, Katy, ,  Prickett, Stephen,  primitive humanity, synecdoche for, , ,  primitivism,  primordial soup, , , ,  The Principle of Relativity (Whitehead),  Principles of Geology (Lyell),  Principles of Physiological Psychology (Wundt),  The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Hogg),  process philosophy,  Proctor, Richard,  Promethean eagle image, – Le Prométhée mal enchaîné (Gide),  Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), ,  psychic energy,  psycho-analysis, , –,  psychodynamics,  Psychological Types (Jung),  psychology, , , , –, , , – Punter, David,  Purgatorio (Dante), , , , ,  Purkinje, Jan Evangelista, –

Index and theology, – Whitehead, – Science and the Modern World (Whitehead), – ,  Science and the Unseen World (Eddington),  ‘The Scientific Movement and Literature’ (Dowden),  sea creatures, – sea, metaphors of Ash-Wednesday, – ‘Choruses from The Rock ’, , ,  The Cocktail Party,  Conrad, – ‘The Dry Salvages’, , , –, – Eliot and Pound, ,  Eliot and Shakespeare, , –, , , –,  embryo image,  Four Quartets,  ghosts, – ‘Little Gidding’, – ‘Marina’, – poetic creation, , – soundscapes, – stillness and silence,  surge, , ,  The Tempest, , , ,  The Waste Land, –, –, ,  sea-change iconography ‘Dirge’, , , – ‘The Dry Salvages’,  Eliot and Donne,  Eliot and Shakespeare, , , ,  The Tempest, , –, ,  sea-plays, ,  sea-voices, , , ,  seaweed, , , –, ,  self. See also doppelgängers; doubles; split self artistic personality,  depth psychology, ,  Eliot and Shakespeare, ,  future selves,  instability of,  reconstruction of,  surrender,  shadow, metaphors of, –, , , –, –, –, ,  Shakespeare and the Modern Poet (Corcoran), ,  ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ (Eliot), , ,  Shakespeare, William. See also The Tempest Anthony and Cleopatra, ,  clairvoyance,  Coriolanus, –, , 



criticism, , – Dowden criticism, – duality,  Eliot and James, , , –,  Eliot and sea-plays, – Eliot and submarine music,  Eliot classicisation, – Eliot lectures, , , – Eliot on Dante,  Eliot on Donne, – Eliot on internal alchemy of poetic creation,  Eliot on language,  Eliot on patterns, –, –, , , – Eliot on poetic personality,  Eliot on The Tempest, –, –, –, –, –,  Eliot relationship to, , – Four Quartets, – Hamlet, , , , , , , – Keats, – King Lear, , ,  language, , –, –,  A Midsummer Night’s Dream, , , , ,  musical patterns, – Pericles, , , , –, ,  poetic creation,  psychological paradox,  Richard III, ,  rough and fine juxtaposition,  scholarship, , – sea as metaphor, –, , –, ,  silence and stillness, – songs,  soundscapes,  The Waste Land, – The Winter’s Tale, –,  ‘Shakespeare’s Final Period’ (Strachey), – Shakespeare’s Language (Kermode),  ‘Shakspere’ (Dowden),  Shelley, Mary,  Shelley, Percy Bysshe, , ,  ships, metaphors of, –, , –,  shudder, , –, ,  sibilance,  sight, –, –, , , See also vision silence, , , – ‘Silence’ (Eliot), – ‘Silence’ (Moore),  siren-songs,  Smith, Grover, , ,  solar death, – ‘Song to the Opherian’ (Eliot),  songs, ,  Sorensen, Roy, –, 



Index

soul, , – sound, , , –, – soundscapes, ,  space, metaphors of, , –, –, , – Space, Time and Gravitation (Eddington), , – space-time, ,  spectres, –, , –, , , See also ghosts Speculations (Hulme),  Spender, Stephen, – split self, –, ,  St. Louis World’s Fair, ,  St.-John Perse,  stars and atoms, , – cosmic dance,  displacement of, ,  fading and dying,  interstellar spaces, , , , , ,  luminosity of,  Stars and Atoms (Eddington), , – Stead, C. K., , ,  Steiner, George, –,  Stevens, Anthony,  Stevenson, Robert Louis,  ‘Still ist die Nacht’ (Heine),  stillness, ,  stone, metaphors of,  Strachey, Lytton, – ‘Strange Meeting’ (Owen),  subconscious, , See also depth psychology; psycho-analysis; unconscious submarine currents, , – language,  light, ,  self,  submarine music, , , , –, –, ,  transformation, , , , – ‘Suite Clownesque’ (Eliot),  Sullivan, J. W. N., – sun, , –, –, , See also solar death ‘Suppressed Complex’ (Eliot), – Suspiria de Profundis (De Quincey),  Sweeney Agonistes (Eliot), , –,  ‘Sweeney Erect’ (Eliot),  Symbolists, –,  Syme, Patrick,  Symons, Arthur,  synaesthesia, ,  T. S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature (Matthews),  Taylor, Gary, 

The Tempest (Shakespeare) Ariel, , , –, , , –, , , , , ,  art and science,  ‘The Dry Salvages’,  Eddington mentalism,  Eliot and Shakespeare, , , –, , , , ,  James introduction, , –, ,  memory and mind,  polyvocality,  quotation,  sea as metaphor, –, –,  Shakespeare scholarship, ,  songs, ,  synaesthesia, – The Waste Land,  Tennyson, Alfred Lord, , , ,  theology, – Theory of Colours (Goethe),  Thomson, James, ,  Thomson, William, – ‘Thoughts After Lambeth’ (Eliot), , – ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ (Eliot), , , , ,  tidal motion, – time Eddington,  Einstein,  past and present, , ,  space-time, ,  Timon of Athens (Shakespeare),  ‘Tintern Abbey’ (Wordsworth),  ‘To Criticize the Critic’ (Eliot),  ‘To Walter de la Mare’ (Eliot), , ,  torrents, – tradition, , , , , , ,  ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (Eliot), , , , , , ,  transformation, , , , ,  Traumnovelle (Schnitzler),  Troland, Leonard,  Trosman, Harry,  The Turn of the Screw (James),  Twain, Mark,  twilight, , , –, –, –, , See also waning dusk Twilight of the Gods (Wagner),  Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche),  Tylor, E. B.,  Über die Erhaltung der Kraft (Helmholtz),  Ulysses (Joyce),  Ulysses (Tennyson),  ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ (Eliot), 

Index uncanny, , , ,  unconscious artistic personality,  depth psychology, , ,  Eliot,  Jungian psychology, ,  Vittoz therapy, – Underhill, Evelyn,  underworld, –, , , ,  universe, , ,  Ussher, Archbishop James,  vacant interstellar spaces, –, , , ,  Valéry, Paul, , , ,  The Vanity of Human Wishes (Johnson),  The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (Eliot),  Vaughan, Henry,  Verdenal, Jean,  vertices, ,  Victorian literary criticism, – violet violet hour, , , –, , ,  violet light, , , , – Virgil, , ,  ‘Virginia’ (Eliot), , – viscera, , , , , ,  vision Berkeley, – clarity of,  Coleridge, – colour vision, , ,  Darwin Snr., – Eliot’s conception,  hollowness,  interstellar,  perception, – peripheral,  physiology of sight, , –, ,  poetic creation,  Purkinje,  Shakespeare,  sightlessness, ,  twilight vision,  Vittoz, Dr. Roger, , , – voices polyvocality, , –, , – sea-voices, , , ,  Völkerpsychologie (Wundt),  Vorticism,  Wagner, Richard, –, ,  waning dusk, , , 



Warner, Marina, , , , , ,  Warren, Charles,  wasps, metaphors of,  The Waste Land (Eliot) auditory imagination,  boats, ,  dark embryo,  death, –,  desert, – destructive element,  as distorted mirror,  doubles,  ‘The Dry Salvages’,  fragmentary method of composition,  psycho-biographical analysis,  sea, , , ,  spectres, ,  Spring rebirth, ,  The Tempest, –,  violet hour, , –,  Vittoz therapy, , ,  water, metaphors of,  Watts, G. F.,  waves, –, – The Waves (Woolf ),  Wells, H. G.,  ‘What the Thunder Said’ (Eliot), ,  The Wheel of Fire (Wilson Knight), –, ,  ‘Whispers of Immortality’ (Eliot), , , ,  white noise,  Whitehead, Alfred North, –,  Whitworth, Michael H., , , , ,  Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von, –,  Wilde, Oscar,  Wilson Knight, G., , , –, , ,  The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), –,  woodcuts,  Woolf, Virginia, , –, , , , ,  Wordsworth, William, –,  Wundt, Wilhelm, ,  Yeats, W. B., , ,  ‘Yeats’ (Eliot), ,  Young Eliot (Crawford),  Young, Edward,  Zajonc, Arthur,  Zwicky, Jan, , , 