T.S. Eliot Materialized

The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life.

—T.S. Eliot, “Baudelaire in Our Time,” Essays Ancient and Modern

The welcome News is in the Letter found.

—John Dryden, Religio Laici or A Laymans Faith

The two tools of criticism are analysis and comparison.

—T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

Today, nearly 100 years after the publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Sacred Wood, and The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot still suffers from the perception of being difficult. It is, of course, a judgment that he himself invited when, in 1923, he boldly declared that the modern poet must become “more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.” The result is, he said, in his magisterial critical voice, that “poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.”1 It is a predictive statement with creative force and capacity.

As my freshman students confirm semester after semester, Eliot is not as difficult as alleged. There are complexities and problems, to be sure: allusions to older texts, often in foreign and even recondite languages, references to a wide variety of historical and cultural figures, philosophical ideas transmuted into complex sensations, arcane words (e.g., “Polyphiloprogenitive”), “metaphysical,” “quaint,” “obscure” language and diction. Nevertheless, many students, and other readers as well, do better than muddle their way through; re-reading helps, particularly when done aloud, and there exists a plethora of cribs and companions to assist the befuddled reader. The real difficulty in reading Eliot, I have come to understand, lies not in some supposed depth at which his meaning lies, accessible, if at all, only to the most knowledgeable and persistent digging and mining. Rather than vertical, the issue is horizontal, and lateral: how parts relate to parts and to whole, one section, verse, word to the next. We are accustomed, however—Romantic even in our theoretical rebellion against Romanticism, in love still with personality and spirit and soul—to look deep within for the true meaning, for the essence that is spirit, which, we all supposedly know, lies far below the surface. If, though, Eliot does not subscribe to these Romantic and modern notions, we may look for his meaning in all the wrong places. I am suggesting, indeed, that he asks to be read laterally, comparatively, even literally. In addition to listing “comparison” as one of the two available tools of the critic, he himself practiced a thoroughly comparative way of reading texts, as the essays included in his first collection, The Sacred Wood (1920), illustrate.2

Let us return to that early essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” from which I quoted above. After delivering his partly defensive assertion that contemporary poets will have to be difficult, Eliot proceeds to link the “school of Donne” with “classical poets” for the way they share the “essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.”³ Immediately recognizable as absent from this formulation, however obscure the definition may appear, is that “inward” turn that he reprobates in the Romantics in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and develops in “The Metaphysical Poets”: there is simply no hint of (Romantic and modern) reflection. Eliot then goes on in the latter essay to the critical, and no doubt surprising, remarks on surface and depth, soul and diction, engaging, as always, in comparison:

It is interesting to speculate whether it is not a misfortune that two of the greatest masters of diction in our language, Milton and Dryden, triumph with a dazzling disregard of the soul. If we continued to produce Miltons and Drydens it might not so much matter, but as things are it is a pity that English poetry has remained so incomplete. Those who object to the “artificiality” of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to “look into our hearts and write”. But 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.⁴

Here, I suspect, Old Possum is at pranks with the literal and the figurative, as he dethrones the heart and soul as the object, end, and test of art.

Eliot’s difficulty lies, I think, where he says that St.-J. Perse’s lies in his Modernist poem Anabasis, which Eliot translated and published, along with an important preface, in 1930. In that preface, Eliot begins with expressed doubt about the need for such a piece while acknowledging the work’s difficulty:

I am by no means convinced that a poem like Anabasis requires a preface at all. It is better to read such a poem six times, and dispense with a preface. But when a poem is presented in the form of a translation, people who have never heard of it are naturally inclined to demand some testimonial. So I give mine hereunder.

“For myself,” Eliot goes on, “there was no need for a preface”; he knew that the poem carries no reference to Xenophon or the Journey of the Ten Thousand, that it has “no particular reference to Asia Minor, and that no map of the migrations could be drawn up.”5 Perse means by his title that “the poem is a series of images of migration, of conquest of vast spaces in Asiatic wastes, of destruction and foundation of cities and civilizations of any races or epochs of the ancient East.”⁶

Borrowing from a French commentator on Perse’s poem (Lucien Fabre), Eliot proceeds to “two notions which may be of use to the English reader.” The first of these notions is that

any obscurity of the poem, on first readings, is due to the suppression of “links in the chain”, of explanatory and connecting matter, and not to incoherence, or to the love of cryptogram. The justification of such abbreviation of method is that the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric civilization. The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced.⁷

Eliot proceeds to another finely analytical paragraph, his second sentence below becoming a virtual staple of subsequent commentary on poetry, one in which the critic is very much present and plainly visible, as well as patently engaged in “Gen’rous Converse” (Alexander Pope):⁸

Such selection of a sequence of images and ideas has nothing chaotic about it. There is a logic of the imagination as well as a logic of concepts. People who do not appreciate poetry always find it difficult to distinguish between order and chaos in the arrangement of images; and even those who are capable of appreciating poetry cannot depend upon first impressions. I was not convinced of Mr Perse’s imaginative order until I had read the poem five or six times. And if, as I suggest, such an arrangement of imagery requires just as much “fundamental brain-work” as the arrangement of an argument, it is to be expected that the reader of a poem should take at least as much trouble as a barrister reading an important decision on a complicated case.⁹

Eliot’s translation of Perse’s poem appears as prose, but Eliot insists it is poetry: “Its sequences, its logic of imagery, are those of poetry and not of prose; and in consequence—at least the two matters are very closely allied—the declamation, the system of stresses and pauses, which is partially exhibited by the punctuation and spacing, is that of poetry and not of prose.”¹⁰

Eliot moves then to the second “notion” he has borrowed from Lucien Fabre, “a tentative synopsis of the movement of the poem,” offering guidance for a first reading, which can be forgotten when the reader no longer needs it.11 It amounts to a putting-in-other-words that “movement,” which is not thematic, of the poem’s ten divisions (e.g., IV. “Foundation of the city,” VII. “Decision to fare forth,” X. “Acclamation, festivities, repose. Yet the urge towards another departure, this time with the mariner”). Eliot immediately adds: “And I believe that this is as much as I need to say about Perse’s Anabasis.” He does say more, however: “I believe this is a piece of writing of the same importance as the later work of Mr James Joyce, as valuable as Anna Livia Plurabelle [later incorporated into Finnegans Wake]. And this is a high estimate indeed.”¹²

The “logic of the imagination” that Eliot defends in his discussion of Anabasis bears a certain relationship to that “mythical method” that he identifies with Joyce in Ulysses: the juxtaposition, without commentary or reflection, of different time periods and cultures, this via the context created by allusions to The Odyssey. Such allusion as appears in the opening verses of The Waste Land functions in similar fashion, although the situation is medieval rather than mythical: there, the comparison and contrast with Chaucer’s pilgrims on the way to Canterbury in April render tellingly the wastelanders’ incapacity for feeling and meaning. Fecundity and fertility comment on, and offer a critique of, modern barrenness and infertility—all without direct authorial intrusion or editorial statement. A burden thus rests on the reader to know, to perceive, the unstated. It is by no means, though, a matter of reading deeply; instead, it is a matter of placing side by side, of comparing two contrasting situations.

In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), the Norton Lectures at Harvard, Eliot returned at the end to the matter of difficult poetry (a section reprinted in his Points of View, 1951). Here, he considers several reasons a reader may find a poem difficult, including “the reader’s having been told, or having suggested to himself, that the poem is going to prove difficult.” Such a reader, reasons Eliot, “obfuscates his senses by the desire to be clever and to look very hard for something he doesn’t know what—or else by the desire not to be taken in”; instead, the reader should begin “in a state of sensitivity.”¹³ Citing himself as instance, Eliot says that the “seasoned reader” “does not bother about understanding; not, at least, at first.” “Finally,” Eliot says, “there is the difficulty caused by the author’s having left out something which the reader is used to finding; so that the reader, bewildered, gropes about for what is absent, and puzzles his head for a kind of ‘meaning’ which is not there, and is not meant to be there.”14 Such a “meaning,” Eliot adds, may serve “to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him.” Some poets, though, “become impatient of this ‘meaning’ which seems superfluous, and perceive possibilities of intensity through its elimination.” After all, “a great deal, in the way of meaning, belongs to prose rather than to poetry,” and the poet should not be engaged in “trying to do other people’s work.”¹⁵

Although not always or altogether clear in these passages, Eliot is interested in something other than an intellectual or merely rational response to literature. He wants the whole person involved, not just “the heart,” but also “the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.” Paraphrasable content, as it were, holds little interest or value—its creation is not the aim of the poet, nor its discovery that of the literary critic (at least, not at first). For these and other reasons, then, dipping deep below the surface, for extractable meaning, may be irrelevant and, at worst, detrimental.

As to meaning, Eliot is much more interested in the verbal or linguistic sort. He develops this point in his essay on Lancelot Andrewes (1928), in which he weaves writing and reading together, beginning with the famous seventeenth-century preacher’s “medieval” way of constructing his sermons, in which the reader must follow the writer’s “immersion” in his material. Reading Bishop Andrewes, writes Eliot,

is like listening to a great Hellenist expounding a text of the Posterior Analytics: altering the punctuation, inserting or removing a comma or a semi-colon to make an obscure passage suddenly luminous, dwelling on a single word, comparing its use in its nearer and in its most remote contexts, purifying a disturbed or cryptic lecture-note into lucid profundity. To persons whose minds are habituated to feed on the vague jargon of our time, when we have a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas about nothing—when a word half-understood, torn from its place in some alien or half-formed science, as of psychology, conceals from both writer and reader the meaninglessness of a statement, when all dogma is in doubt except the dogmas of sciences of which we have read in the newspapers, when the language of theology itself, under the influence of an undisciplined mysticism of popular philosophy, tends to become a language of tergiversation—Andrewes may seem pedantic and verbal. It is only when we have saturated ourselves in his prose, followed the movement of his thought, that we find his words terminating in the ecstasy of assent. Andrewes takes a word and derives the world from it; squeezing and squeezing the word until it yields a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to possess. In this process the qualities…of ordonnance and precision…are exercised.16

A remarkable work of literary analysis, compact and insightful, this brief passage sums up crucial perspectives on comparative reading, textual integrity, readerly submission to texts and “total absorption” in them, and the necessary closest attention to words qua words. The passage thus inadvertently offers insight into, and perhaps justification for, Eliot’s surprising declaration in a footnote to his essay on Baudelaire included in Essays Ancient and Modern (1936): whereas, he wrote there, “the spirit killeth,” “the letter giveth life.”¹⁷ Eliot’s no doubt unexpected inversion of a biblical truism anticipates—and is perhaps clarified by, as it clarifies—his later statement in “Burnt Norton” that “that which is living / Can only die.”

Thus, perhaps, it should be no surprise that, when—constantly—asked about the meaning of the “three white leopards” in Ash-Wednesday (1930), Eliot replied that they mean “three white leopards.”¹⁸ About that poem, incidentally, the late distinguished classicist D.S. Carne-Ross wrote, in a brilliant piece on Pound, that “Eliot’s poem is ‘difficult,’ I suppose, but it’s the kind of difficulty we enjoy. It flatters our self-esteem. Pound’s simplicity is simply chastening.”¹⁹ Whether or not he is wrong about Eliot and Ash-Wednesday (and I for one find him misleading), Carne-Ross points, in contrasting the two poets and friends, a way toward understanding Old Possum (as Ole Ez called him). Eliot (too) may be simpler than our alleged self-esteem would appreciate.

In “The Music of a Lost Dynasty,” included in his collection Instaurations, Carne-Ross effectively represents Pound’s simplicity by emphasizing his stolid insistence on the literal. Whereas Dante and Milton, for example, as Christian poets, use the myth of Persephone as a “figure,” Pound takes it as “the literal truth”:

Hence for the last two thousand years poetry has had to be polysemous, as Servius said of Virgil and Dante said of himself and critics say admiringly of every important modern author except Pound. Poetry has had to point away from the first, literal level to deeper layers of meaning, to “that which is signified by the letter,” as Dante puts it. The thing, however concretely rendered, always “stands for” something else supposedly more important. But Pound is not polysemous; his first level doesn’t point beyond itself.²⁰

But this refusal to “point away from the first, literal level to deeper layers of meaning” is, I hope to convince you, exactly what we find in Eliot (too); and that means, pace Carne-Ross, he is following the fundamentally Incarnational basis of Christianity. But Eliot is (therefore) not Pound; he is no pagan immanentist (to take Herbert N. Schneidau’s apt summation of Pound).21

Before turning to Eliot, and comparing Old Possum and Ole Ez, let us stay for a moment longer with Carne-Ross discussing Pound and the literal. “I don’t want to be facile,” he writes, “and say that what is difficult about Pound’s poem [The Cantos] is the simplicity and yet in a sense this is true”:

We feel something is missing there; the whole reverberating dimension of inwardness is missing. There is no murmurous echo chamber where deeps supposedly call to deeps. Not merely does the thing, in Pound’s best verse, not point beyond itself: scandalously, it doesn’t point to us. The green tip that pushes through the earth does not stand for or symbolize man’s power of spiritual renewal. And in no way has it been created or half created by man—“processed into an object of consciousness,” so that it becomes part and parcel of a subjective mental activity. It is really there. Later Pound said of another natural phenomenon: “Leaf is a LEAF / that is enough / it has infinite implications. LOOK at it, look at the leaf / dont try to make it into a symbol of something ELSE.” The green tip is not symbolic and it is not polysemous. Pound’s whole effort is not to be polysemous but to give back to the literal level its full significance, its old significance.²² (Carne-Ross’s italics)

But—to say it again—Pound is not Eliot, Eliot no “pagan immanentist.” Leaving aside the vexed question of when he shared the Christian understanding of Incarnation (I for one think it well before his formal conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927), we can see, from early on in his writing, how Eliot differs from Pound’s “literalism.” The crux lies in precisely how Eliot understands the relation between differences. Consider the following passage from the chapter “Imperfect Critics,” included in The Sacred Wood. Eliot is here discussing the “Romantic aristocrat” George Wyndham, and he offers an apt description of both Romanticism and its fundamental misunderstanding of the necessary relation between critical differences:

the only cure for Romanticism is to analyse it. What is permanent and good in Romanticism is curiosity— . . . a curiosity which recognizes that any life, if accurately and profoundly penetrated, is interesting and always strange. Romanticism is a short cut to the strangeness without the reality, and it leads its disciples only back upon themselves.²³

Eliot thus distinguishes between “reality” and “strangeness” and maintains that the proper relation between them involves a way: you get to the strange, that is, in, through, and by means of the real—a way that the Romantics forgo, believing that you can bypass, or transcend, the real and proceed directly to the strange. Thus revealed is a key structure, or pattern.

That pattern, which at least in time Eliot came to understand as Incarnational, has far-reaching implications. It means, for example, that each and every moment is “attended”; there is, that is, an “intersection” of one place and time with another (as in allusions from the medieval period juxtaposed with “now” at the beginning of The Waste Land and as in the “mythical method” that Joyce employs in Ulysses). Further, it is unwise to hierarchize, to “privilege” one part of a binary difference at the expense of the other: for example, literal and figurative. Eliot would not, in other words, subscribe to Pound’s unitary elevation of the literal, which participates in the pattern also apparent in the Romantics’ “short cut to the strangeness without the reality.” Pound, that is to say, stops with the literal, believing it “unattended,” rather than proceeding in, through, and by means of it to the figurative. Although you do not stop with the literal, you do not transcend it either, in the sense of leaving it behind once and for all.

In Christian understanding, as Eliot came to express it in Ash-Wednesday and in Four Quartets, the literal does not “stand for” something else; it is not a symbol; and it does “point beyond” itself. Thus the “Lady of silences” in Ash-Wednesday, an enigmatic and for many a perplexing if not contradictory figure, may be at once both the Virgin Mary and not Her; embodying it, she is mediation literally. We “half understand,” says Eliot in Four Quartets,24 meaning, I take it, that we can understand one of the two linked differences but not both together—and as one. Understanding may require of us nothing less than “a lifetime’s death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.” Hints and guesses are all about: “Hints followed by guesses; and the rest / Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action.” According to “The Dry Salvages,” third of the Four Quartets, from which I have been quoting, “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.”

Let us linger with this verse from “The Dry Salvages,” arguably the most meaningful that Eliot wrote. It fully illustrates the necessity of a literal reading. Note, to begin with, the absence of the expected “the” before “Incarnation.” Eliot is thus not talking here about the historical occurrence whereby God (literally) became man; rather, he is referring to the timeless, universal pattern, the paradigmatic instance of which is the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. Further, note the repetition of the word “half.” At first glance, probably, we assume that the poet means the hint partly guessed, the gift partly understood. But that is not what the words (literally) say. Instead, with Incarnation understood as the “impossible union” of opposites, which is the Incarnation, the meaning is: we get one half of that union, either immanence or transcendence (as always), but not both and at the same time.

Given the Incarnation, and the divinization of every moment in every place, before as well as after the Advent, a leaf is, indeed, a leaf, as Pound insisted; it does not stand for or point toward something else; but the leaf also, and at the same time, means the work of transcendence as well as of immanence. For Pound, there is what a rather different thinker and writer called “seriality without paradigm,” meaning total and complete immanence (without benefit of what Derrida also called a “Transcendental Signifier”).25

Matters pretty quickly get muddied, appear to get out of hand. That is, “transcendent” also connotes the vertical, whereas “immanent” connotes the horizontal and the lateral, and the vertical, of course, extends both above and below the level where the horizontal intersects with it. In the terms we have been using throughout this essay, this means that the “transcendent,” the vertical, stretches both toward the spiritual and toward the deep, the horizontal having to do (only) with the literal and the apparent surface.

What counts, I want to suggest (without any claim or pretense to orthodoxy, or heterodoxy, for that matter), is this: the literal saves the figurative from thorough-going spirit-ualism, whereby the peregrine spirit walks free and easy, unimpeded; the figurative, on the other hand, saves the literal from the sort of immersion in the physical that readily emerges with (Poundian) literalism and immanence. You need both transcendence and immanence, literal and figurative, letter and spirit. Eliot works toward that “necessarye coniunction” that he mentions and extols in “East Coker.”

In this little book I attempt to read with “the same Spirit that its Author writ.”²⁶ My eye will always be squarely on the literal, which I maintain has been unfairly neglected by academic critics of Eliot, who, perhaps taking their cue from Old Possum in his notorious—and laborious—notes to The Waste Land, allow no symbol to escape their purview, nor any depth to go unmined. They persist in wanting to know, refusing (again) to take Eliot at his word, what those “three leopards” stand for. I shall, though, try to accept the thing as thing, the word as what it plainly says.

Reading literally, especially word by word, works against the reader’s will-fulness, that desire, need, or tendency to impose. Although he does not use the word, and perhaps would not endorse the developed notion, Pound suggests a sort of lateral reading when he identifies “texture” as “the indispensable component” in texts like his friend William Carlos Williams’s poems.27 Rather than digging deep into texts, effecting a descent into the lower reaches not immediately visible or discernible, such a way of reading would incarnate a willingness to bide time, would resist the powerful temptation to leap to ideas and meanings, and would reside for a time with words. It entails, certainly, relating parts to one another and to some projected sense of the whole, taking quotations seriously, noting allusions, reacting to the charges of language. A web of relations emerges from what may be described as intra-textuality. Reading texture puts us in touch with the text as textile.

Rather than digging into texts, lateral reading entails reading widely: that is, reading more, and still more, and bringing that further reading to bear. It is, if you will, a nonspecialist activity, an amateur’s approach, that of a once-common reader.

The movement is lateral, rather than down. For a sufficient time, such reading remains unashamedly on the surface, attuned to visible details and the charges set off by observed sameness, similarity, resonance, and difference. It appears an altogether more natural act, responsive and responsible to what appears. It thus takes very little for granted, is therefore modest, and unpretentious.

As readers, as with a culture, we are obsessed with meaning; we also assume that ideas occupy a privileged position relative to form. Despite our materialism, and the obsession with the body, we pay very little attention to “the glowing sensible world” and thus to bodies of whatever stripe. Spirit governs body, flesh, matter, or so we presume. Intra-textuality restores primacy to the building blocks, the fundamentals, from which we may proceed, in time and with due attention and effort, to the putatively more sophisticated and exotic. We must, however, always go in, through, and by means of.

Reading laterally returns attention and focus to how texts work, how they are put together, what they do. The quest for meaning is neither voided nor forgotten, although it comes second. Reading laterally is more akin to reading like a writer than to reading as a scholar or critic.²⁸

Let me be clear, for I fear that I may have inadvertently made literal and lateral reading sound easy, or at least easier than so-called close reading. It is not at all easy. In fact, it closely resembles study, for even if you do not find yourself engaged in extensive, archival research, you are reading and re-reading the text. Spending countless hours with it, poring over relations, listening intently and addressing question after question to the text, you recall the philologist probing minute details, the Rabbinical scholar consumed by the text. It is, indeed, the work of reading that engages you.

Eliot—as always—says it best. I refer to his little-known preface to Thoughts for Meditation: A Way to Recovery from Within, an anthology selected and arranged by N. Gangulee and brought out by Faber and Faber in 1951. I shall quote liberally, for Eliot’s words resonate with a number of the present book’s concerns.

Very few people, I suspect, know how to read—in the sense of able to read for a variety of motives and to read a variety of books each in the appropriate way. We all read for diversion, or in order to satisfy a temporary curiosity; most of us read also under the necessity of acquiring information or a grasp of the contents of some book for an immediate end. For many workers, it is difficult to read a book unless it has some bearing on their own work; a professional reviewer may come to find it difficult to read a book except for the purpose of reviewing it; and a publisher may come to find it difficult to read a book except as a manuscript to be accepted or rejected. Philosophy is difficult, unless we discipline our minds for it; the full appreciation of poetry is difficult for those who have not trained their sensibility by years of attentive reading. But devotional reading is the most difficult of all, because it requires an application, not only of the mind, not only of the sensibility, but of the whole being.

This is perhaps the most approximate way of reading I have come across. Eliot adds to the helpfulness in describing this meditational kind of reading: “to attend closely to every word, to ponder on the [passages] read for a little while and try to fix them in my mind, so that they may continue to affect me while my attention is engrossed with the affairs of the day.”29 I would not say, of course, that Eliot’s poetry always requires such a “meditational” reading, but I do believe that Four Quartets clearly benefits from such—and that the reader does too.

This attention to the literal will, to repeat, mean a lateral, rather than deep, reading of Eliot’s poems. Ample precedent exists for lateral reading, even if it be not much recognized as such. It is there in Homer’s insistence on it (in, for example, the juxtaposition without authorial commentary of Odysseus’s very different reactions to Agamemnon and Achilles in the climactic visit to the Kingdom of the Dead); in the frequent and critical tonal shifts and variations in diction in Dryden and Pope, which are often associated with their age’s interest in the mock-epic or mock-heroic, itself a literary strategy dependent upon bringing a standard to “attend” upon the present; in the shifts in language, diction, and tone that accompany the different personae in Eliot’s friend Pound’s great poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, the extent of which poem’s influence on Eliot has not been sufficiently recognized. What I mean is readily apparent in Eliot’s verse: perhaps most notably in the near-repetition of the opening line in the first poem of Ash-Wednesday and the last (“Because I do not hope to turn”; “Although I do not hope to turn”); in the sophomoric, and bathetic, verses that follow the magnificent excursus on the Logos in the fifth poem of Ash-Wednesday (“there is not enough silence / Not on the sea or on the islands, not / On the mainland, in the desert or the main land . . . ”); variously throughout Four Quartets, which require constant, scrupulous attention by the reader to repetitions and differences, Eliot in the business here too of “rhyming” across large sections of this magisterial essay-poem. Lateral reading and literal reading depend upon one another, and in Eliot lead to the recognition, appreciation, and understanding of his critical intentions.

Consider, as an extended instance of lateral and literal reading done together, the following: a lateral reading such as I have been describing may connote something more than a “sideways,” crab-like essai. Take Dryden’s essay-poem Religio Laici or A Laymans Faith, from which I have drawn one of my epigraphs above. In those quoted verses, as a matter of fact, appears the work’s dynamic progression, akin to what Walter A. Davis calls, in an acute theoretical analysis, “immanent purposiveness.”30 That is, as Dryden says, so his poem does: it precisely “guides us upward,” to God, as Absolute Authority, amidst the conflicting and portentous claims of sects, theologies, and churches, for in the last resort, we can be sure, “God would not leave us without a way.”³¹ All other positions lack. Here, undeniably forward movement serves to promote upwardness—the latter a metaphor, obviously.

Reading Religio Laici, however, you proceed via a lateral movement (even as you edge upward). There is little or no digging or excavating, as you juxtapose passages, positions, and embodiments: Deist, Roman Catholic, sectarians or “fanaticks.” Comparison and contrast dominate, and lead to the final “resolution” as an alternative—the “middle way” that is the Established Church—emerges. Religio Laici is, moreover, revealed to and by means of a literal, as well as a lateral, reading. Unlike perhaps most great works of the imagination, Dryden’s remarkable essay-poem does not proceed, or function, metaphorically. Few images occur, the most notable and important being at the beginning, with the image of reason as sun-like. Indeed, contrary to expectations (and some commentary), Dryden builds his argument in this fashion: if anything “stands for” something else, it is not from literal to metaphorical. The represented religious positions are, as I said, embodied, represented in persons, whose religious, theological, and ecclesiastical (and, of course, political) positions matter as moral; that is to say, Dryden works toward the most concrete and literal level, what these positions entail morally, for the person holding them as person. Thus we move—laterally, by the way—from these verses early on:

Dar’st thou, poor Worm, offend Infinity?

And must the Terms of Peace be giv’n by Thee?

Then Thou art Justice in the last Appeal;

Thy easie God instructs Thee to rebell:

And, like a King remote and weak, must take

What Satisfaction Thou art pleas’d to make. (93–98)

to these climactic lines, completing the picture of the moral values operative in the poem and needed in the world:

So all we make of Heavens discover’d Will

Is, not to have it, or to use it ill.

The Danger’s much the same; on several Shelves

If others wreck us, or we wreck our selves.

What then remains, but, waving each Extreme,

The Tides of Ignorance, and Pride to stem?

Neither so rich a Treasure to forgo;

Nor proudly seek beyond our pow’r to know…(423–30)

Religious questions resolve into questions of morality and personal conduct. Instead of plunging ever more deeply into matters, Dryden, as it were, peels off layer after layer to reveal a core, or pit.

The “letter” matters, as he has written: “The welcome News is in the Letter found,” in his poem as in Scripture. Being a layperson, to whom the work is after all addressed by a fellow-member of the laity, you read what is “needfull to be known,” leaving to the professionals, you amateur, you “common reader,” the intricate details, matters controverted and inessential to you as person. There is no need for “expounding,” by either (a self-interested) priesthood or a preacher “gifted” by the “private spirit,” for those matters necessary to the layman in his quest for salvation are, simply, “plain”—rather like Dryden’s poem itself, often mistakenly abused as prosaic. Style thus matches argument or position, mirroring it. You understand Religio Laici or a Laymans Faith as you do Scripture according to Dryden, by reading the words, themselves “plain” to common sense, everything you need to know, observable—laid out, in other words.

In Religio Laici, it turns out, lateral reading is best because the text itself demands it, being constructed according to lateral principles. Lateral reading of the text here reveals how it works, what it does: guiding us upward to God, necessitating distinctions based on comparison and measurement, and directing attention not to some meaning that must be brought to light from deep within but, instead, elucidating its very nature, its way(s) of being, its interweavings and entwinings, and thus its texture as text(ile).

In Eliot’s magisterial essay-poem Four Quartets, in my judgment the greatest religious work since The Divine Comedy, matters proceed yet otherwise from Dryden’s in Religio Laici. There is no progressive, ever-forward movement, for the structural principle at work is Incarnational, and so at every point in the poem transcendent power shines through, each detail indeed luminous. This you apprehend, as you do Religio Laici’s guiding principle, by means of the sensible and the observable, through relating part to part, not through dissection or least of all excavation.

I turn in the following chapter to Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (1930), Eliot’s first long poem after converting to the Church of England (1927). The way that we read has a lot to do with what we perceive in poems (I am not prepared, here, to argue which comes first). As it happens, this great poem has itself a great deal to say about the literal and its relation to the spiritual. Ash-Wednesday thus lays the groundwork for the analyses that follow in this book. Attention to the literal—that is, both the theme and the fact—leads us to notice, perhaps differently from before, major concerns, such as Eliot’s with questions of separation and the possibility of at least bringing together differences and even oppositions. The question of relation thus emerges, not least of that which obtains between letter and spirit. Always, whether in the way of reading pursued or the focus assumed, I seek not to separate myself from Eliot but to intersect with him.

Truth to tell, a literal reading of Eliot’s poems mirrors the way of understanding embodied in them. One reflects the other. Embodiment means, after all, that the body shows—you don’t have to transcend it, and leave it behind, to reach some point, meaning, or truth. Instead, it lies there, as if exposed, on the surface, as visible as the letter.

Notes

1T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 289.

2T.S. Eliot, “Imperfect Critics,” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 33.

3Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” 290.

4Ibid.

5T.S. Eliot, preface, Anabasis, by St.-J. Perse, trans. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), 7.

6Ibid., 7–8.

7Ibid., 8.

8Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in Poetry and Prose, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1969), line 641.

9Eliot, Anabasis, 8.

10Ibid., 9.

11Ibid., 9–10.

12Ibid., 10.

13T.S. Eliot, “ ‘Difficult’ Poetry,” Points of View (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 50.

14Ibid., 51.

15Ibid., 52.

16T.S. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” Selected Essays, 347–48.

17T.S. Eliot, “Baudelaire in His Time,” Essays Ancient and Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 68n.

18T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930).

19D.S. Carne-Ross, “The Music of a Lost Dynasty,” Instaurations: Essays in and out of Literature, Pindar to Pound (Berkeley: U of California P, 1979), 216.

20Ibid., 213.

21Herbert N. Schneidau, Waking Giants: The Presence of the Past in Modernism (New York: Oxford UP, 1991). I am aware of the “fourfold interpretation of Scripture.

22Carne-Ross, Instaurations, 214.

23T.S. Eliot, “Imperfect Critics,” 27–28.

24T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).

25Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Border Lines,” trans. James Hulbert, Deconstruction and Criticism, by Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller (New York: Seabury-Continuum, 1979), 130.

26Pope, An Essay on Criticism, line 234.

27Ezra Pound, “Dr. Williams’ Position,” Polite Essays (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, n.d.), 76. Here, I think of literal reading in relation to lines in “Little Gidding” (last of the Four Quartets) in which Eliot speaks, not for the first time in the poem, of the way up and the way down. I will argue below that, pace Heraclitus, he doubts there is an identity; the way up is in, through, and by means of the way down. Extrapolating, we might (too easily) suppose that the way to read responsibly lies in, through, and by means of digging deep inside a text, but in fact, the way to responsible reading leads in, through, and by means of the literal. We, thus, have to be careful in moving among analogues of such binaries.

28Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).

29T.S. Eliot, preface, Thoughts for Meditation: A Way to Recovery from Within, sel. and arr. N. Gangulee (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 11–12.

30Walter A. Davis, The Act of Interpretation: A Critique of Literary Reason (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978).

31John Dryden, Poems and Fables, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford UP, 1962), line 296.