THE VOCATION OF THE POET IN THE MODERN WORLD

To have a vocation is to have a calling, to be called. One may be called by the powers of evil as well as the powers of good, but it is clear that one must respond with the whole of one’s being. In this sense it is also clear that to have a vocation is very much like being in love. Being in love and being called to write poetry are often linked, and many people feel the need to write poetry when they are in love. As there are many errors in love, so there are many errors in the writing of poetry. And as there is puppy love, there is adolescent poetry.

Since there are errors and since a calling is a very important matter, since one is called during the formative and decisive years of existence, there is much doubt and hesitation about the fact of having a calling, and a period of trial is prescribed in some vocations, while one of the reasons for going to school, after a certain point, is to determine if one has a true vocation, if one has truly been called; and it is in some kind of school that we prepare ourselves to be adequate to our vocation.

In poetry, it is particularly true that many are called and few are chosen. And to be a poet in the modern world means a certain important renunciation which does not hold of all vocations: it means that there is little hope or none of being able to earn a living directly by the writing of poetry; and this has been true in the past, although in other ways, as well as in the modern life; for example, Dryden speaks of “not having the vocation of poverty to scribble.” In the modern world, it is hard to think of any poet who has had from the start any real economic support for the writing of poetry. There are prizes, grants, patrons, and poetry is honored by much generosity and much prestige. Unfortunately, these are provided after the poet has established himself—and not always then—but during the first and perhaps most difficult years of being a poet, the best a poet can do is to get some other job to support his effort to be a poet. In recent years, the job of teaching English has provided a good many positions which help the poet during his first years, but it is not entirely clear that this is a good thing. For to have a vocation means that one must respond with the whole of one’s being; but teaching should be a vocation too, and not a job, and when the poet takes teaching as a job, he may injure or weaken himself as a poet, or he may not be adequate to all that the task of teaching requires. All the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil combine to lure the poet to success as a teacher and to the rewards of successful academic ambition. At the same time that the poet resists these temptations, he must resign himself to the likelihood that a genuine poetic reputation can be achieved only among others who are poets—for it is mostly poets who read any poetry except what is to be found in anthologies—and the kind of fame (that last infirmity of noble mind, as Milton said) which he would like will come to him, if it comes at all, only in middle age.

What I have just said should distinguish roughly the difference between being a poet in the modern world from what it may have been in other historical periods. If we turn again to the wisdom, tried and inherited for so many years, to be found in the origins of words, we remember that to be a poet is to be a maker, to be the maker of something new, to make something new by putting things and words together. The distinguishing mark of the poet, that aptitude which more than any other skill of the mind makes him a poet, is metaphor, according to Aristotle. Now metaphor is literally a bearing-across, or a bringing-together of things by means of words. And composition, which is what the poet accomplishes by all the elements of his poem when they are brought together in a unity, structural, formal, intuitive, and musical—composition means putting things together, bringing them together into a unity which is original, interesting and fruitful. Thus the poet at any time may be said to be engaged in bringing things together, in making new things, in uniting the old and the new, all by the inexhaustible means which words provide for him. In this way, the poet as creator, and metaphor-maker, and presiding bringer of unity is a kind of priest. He unites things, meanings, attitudes, feelings, through the power, prowess and benediction of words, and in this way he is a priest who performs a ceremony of marriage each time he composes a poem. Unfortunately, not all marriages are happy.

In the modern world, the poet who has been truly called cannot respond as poets did in idyllic and primitive periods when merely the naming of things, as Adam named the animals, was enough to bring poems into existence. On the contrary, he must resist the innumerable ways in which words are spoiled, misused, commercialized, deformed, mispronounced, and in general degraded. We can see clearly how much this resistance is part of the vocation of the poet if we consider the recurrent references to language itself in the poems of that truly modern poet, T. S. Eliot. These references occur in his poems from the very start, continue in each volume he has published, and culminate in a passage in his most recent book of poems, Four Quartets:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres—

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it.

Elsewhere in his work there is a sensitivity to colloquial speech—and a kind of horror or anguish about it—which arises from the fact that for a modern poet, as for any poet, words are the keys to what he wants.

Eliot’s play in verse, “Sweeney Agonistes,” is the best example of this aspect of his feeling about language, which is used to express a profound anguish about human beings and human existence. When language is degraded in speech, then the basis in community life for the art of poetry is diseased; and it is appropriate and perhaps inevitable that the great modern poet who should have felt this fact with as much acuteness as any other poet should at the same time be an author who acquired an English accent after arriving at the age of reason. Nevertheless, just as certain kinds of disease make for a greater sensitivity to experience or a more precise observation of reality (the blind know more about how things sound and how they feel to the touch than those who have normal vision), so, too, the disease which degrades language in the modern world may help to bring about the remarkable and often multilingual sensitivity of the modern poet to the language which is the matrix from which he draws his poems.

Degradation and disease are strong words of condemnation, and a great claim is also made when one says that the degradation and disease to which poetry is subjected in the modern world are also one of the fruitful and necessary conditions of genuine poetry and of a genuine vocation for the art of poetry. For the sake of justifying these claims, let us examine small and convenient examples. The word, intrigue, is a noun which has four legitimate meanings. It means something which is intricate; it means “a plot, or a plotting intended to affect some purpose by secret artifice”; thirdly, it is “the plot of a play or romance”; fourthly, it is “a secret and illicit love affair; an amour; a liason” (this fourth meaning probably derives from the third). And the synonyms of intrigue are plot, scheme, machination, and conspiracy. Notice that there is no sense in which the word means something overwhelmingly attractive and fascinating, unless one thinks of secret and illicit love affairs as overpowering in their fascination. However, at present, the use of the word as a noun has fallen into decay. Although there are still references to schemers who engage in conspiracies and intrigues, the noun has become a verb in popular usage: anyone who is said to be intriguing is said to be very attractive, in fact, fascinating like a Hollywood star, or like the spy Mata Hari. An intrigue was something unpleasant, dishonorable, underhand, and immoral. But now to be intriguing is to be wonderfully desirable or interesting and has no unfavorable or dishonorable association. The sense of the same word has thus been turned upside down; it has changed, in popular usage, from signifying something unscrupulous to representing in a vague but unmistakeable way something which is extremely interesting, desirable, or beautiful, and has no immediate connotations of moral disrepute.

What has happened to one word has happened to many words and can happen to many more. And the causes are not, as is sometimes supposed, limited to a poor teaching of English, or a disregard of the dictionary. In this instance, the shift is probably involved in the radical trial which conventional morality has undergone in the last twenty-five years, and certainly there is also involved the influence of newspapers, the stage, the films, and the literary zest with which most people read of the sins of others.

This example does not make clear how a degradation in the meaning of a word can be fruitful as well as foolish. There is a shift of meaning and a new richness of meaning, of course, but some of the exactness has already been lost and more is going to be lost. Let me point out two more examples in which the complicated and mixed benefits and losses of the change may appear more fully. For a number of years I taught English composition. I taught because I was unable to support myself by writing poetry (for the most part, however, I like to teach very much). When I began to teach, I was confounded by simple misuses of languages of which intrigue is a fairly representative example. One student wrote that “swimming is my chief abstraction,” and another student said that “a certain part of my native city is slightly ugly.” A third student who was attempting to describe the salutary effects of higher education upon all members of the fairer and weaker sex said that it was good for a girl to go to college because “it makes a girl broader.” When I corrected the last word in accordance with my instructions as to the proper usage of English—and with a physical sense of one of the meanings of broader—the student protested that I had a peculiar mind; otherwise I would not object to the way in which she used broader instead of broadens.

These errors—errors at least from the point of view of conventional and prescribed usage—made me reflect upon the character I played as a teacher of composition. The students thought I was pedantic when they did not think I was idiosyncratic. The difficulty was that so many of them made the same errors that, in a way, they were no longer errors. Moreover, the longer I thought about some of the errors, the more they seemed to be possible enlargements of meaning and association which might be creative. There was a real sense in which swimming, for an urban human being, was an abstraction as well as a distraction. So too, to say that something was slightly ugly was to suggest that a word or words denoting degrees of ugliness from homeliness and plainness to what was utterly ugly were lacking in English. And finally, it was true enough that education might make a girl broader as well as broaden a girl’s outlook, although I doubt that this would have occurred to me if it had not been for this fruitful error.

The experience of teaching English literature and English poetry directly confronts the poet who teaches English with what can only be described as the most educated part of the population. Before the poet has taught English, he may well have been under the impression that no one except poets read modern poetry (with a few and misleading exceptions). When he teaches poetry in the classroom, he finds out something which may be a great hope or a great delusion. It may be a delusion now and a hope for the future. At any rate, he does discover that he can persuade any student to understand any kind of poetry, no matter how difficult. They understand it as long as they are in the classroom, and they remain interested in it until they depart from school. Since so many poets have more and more undertaken the teaching of English and of poetry, it does seem possible that this may be the beginning of a new audience trained in reading and aware of how marvelous and exalted the rewards of poetry can be. But this is a matter which must be realized in the future. In the present, it is true that as soon as the student leaves school, all the seductions of mass culture and middle-brow culture, and in addition the whole way of life of our society, combine to make the reading of poetry a dangerous and quickly rejected luxury. The poet who teaches has immediate experiences in the classroom which give him some reason to hope for a real literary and poetic renaissance. As soon as he departs from the pleasant confines of the university, he discovers that it is more and more true that less and less people read serious poetry. And the last straw may be the recognition that even poets do not read very much poetry: Edwin Arlington Robinson confessed that during the latter half of his life, he read hardly any poems except his own which he read again and again, and which may explain the paralysis of self-imitation which overcomes many good poets in mid-career. Here then is another trait which distinguishes the vocation of the modern poet from poets of the past: he not only knows how language is inexactly and exactly used, he also knows that for the most part only other poets will read his poems.

One reason that language is misused, whether fruitfully or not, is that in modern life experience has become international. In America itself the fact of many peoples and the fact that so large a part of the population has some immigrant background and cherishes the fragments of another language creates a multilingual situation in which words are misused and yet the language is also enriched by new words and new meanings. To make fun of errors in the use of language and to make the most comedy possible of foreign accents—or for that matter, an English accent—is an important and vital part of American humor, which is itself a very important part of American life. Moreover, the pilgrimage to Europe has for long been an important episode in the national experience. The American tourist in Europe, Baedeker in hand, has for generations spelled out the names of places, and works of art, and delicious foods. And most crucial of all, the experience of two world wars has made Americans conscious of the extent to which the very quality of their lives depends upon the entire international situation. Whether the danger is from Germany or from Russia, whether a banking scandal occurs in Paris, or Spain becomes Fascist, or the Vatican intervenes in American politics and American morality and American education, no one at this late date can fail to be aware of the extent to which the fate of the individual is inseparable from what is happening in the whole world.

These facts are, of course, in one sense platitudes; and yet it may not be clear how they affect the modern poet in his vocation as such. I want to resort to examples again before trying to define the way in which the international scene and an involvement with it affect the poet as a poet and have to do with his calling.

To quote once more from that truly modern poet, T. S. Eliot, here is a passage from one of his best poems, “Gerontion.” Christ, the protagonist says is:

To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk

Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero

With caressing hands, at Limoges

Who walked all night in the next room;

By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;

By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room

Shifting the candles; Fraülein von Kulp

Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door.

Let us think a little merely of the names of the people he remembers, Mr. Silvero, Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, Fraülein von Kulp. Is it not evident that the experience which provides the subject-matter of the poet or inspires him to write his poem is not only European, but international, since Hakagawa is presumably Japanese; and involves all history, all culture, since the reference here to Titian is matched elsewhere by allusions to ancient Egypt, Buddhist sermons, and the religion of classical Greece? Another aspect of the same involvement and of how it has a direct impact on the writing of the poetry is illustrated in “Sweeney Agonistes” where “two American gentlemen here on business” arrive in London and rehearse the clichés of colloquial American speech: London, one of them explains with great politeness to his English friends, is “a slick place, London’s a swell place,/London’s a fine place to come on a visit—,” and the other adds with equal politeness: “Specially when you got a real live Britisher/A guy like Sam to show you around/Sam of course is at home in London,/And he’s promised to show us around.” In the same work, at a moment of great anguish, another character reiterates the poet’s extreme sensitivity to and concern for language when he says: “I gotta use words when I talk to you.”

If Eliot as a transplanted American in Europe seems to be a special case (a great poet, however, is always a special case, if one chooses to regard him in that light), the example of James Joyce should help to reinforce the somewhat complicated (because ubiquitous) thesis I am trying to elucidate. Joyce was an impoverished Irishman. As Eliot had to toil for some time in a bank while he tried to write poems, Joyce supported himself during the composition of Ulysses by teaching in a Berlitz school in Trieste during the first World War. The publication of Ulysses—an event which was described by a French critic as marking Ireland’s spectacular reentry into European literature—was sufficiently a success to make a rich Englishman provide Joyce with financial security almost until the end of his life. Two years before, Joyce had completed his last and probably his best work, the stupendous Finnegans Wake, a book which would in itself provide sufficient evidence and illustration of the vocation of the modern poet in modern life.1 All that has been observed in Eliot’s work is all the more true of Finnegans Wake:—the attention to colloquial speech, the awareness of the variety of ways in which languages can be degraded and how that degradation can be the base for a new originality and exactitude, the sense of an involvement with the international scene and with all history. But more than that, the radio and even television play a part in this wonderful book, as indeed they played a part in the writing of it. Joyce had a shortwave radio with which he was able to hear London, Moscow, Dublin—and New York! In Finnegans Wake, I was perplexed for a time by echoes of American radio comedy and Yiddish humor until I learned about Joyce’s radio and about his daily reading of the Paris edition of the New York Herald-Tribune. The most important point of all, however, is that Finnegans Wake exhibits in the smallest detail and in the entire scope of the work the internationality of the modern poet, his involvement in all history, and his consciousness of the impingement of any foreign language from Hebrew to Esperanto upon the poet’s use of the English language.

It is foolish to speculate about the future of anything as precarious as the vocation of poetry—an eminent critic said some years ago that the technique of verse was a dying one, but Joyce may have persuaded him to change his mind—but to think of the future is as inevitable as it is dubious. Joyce’s last book suggests certain tentative formulations about the future of the writing of poetry. It suggests that there can be no turning back, unless civilization itself declines as it did when the Roman Empire fell. Yet it is also clear that poets cannot go forward in a straight line from the point at which Finnegans Wake concluded. What they can do is not evident in the least, apart from the fact that a literal imitation or extension of Joyce would be as mechanical as it is undesirable: too much in the very nature of his work depends upon personal and idiosyncratic traits of the author, his training as a Jesuit, his love of operatic music, the personal pride which was involved in his departure from Ireland and the infatuation with everything Irish which obsessed him in this as in his other books. There are other important elements in Joyce’s work and in his life which do lead, I think, to some tentative generalization about the future of poetry and the vocation of the poet. One of them was pointed out to me by Meyer Schapiro (who has influenced me in much of what I have said throughout): the question has been raised as to why Joyce, both in Ulysses and in Finnegans Wake, identified himself with Jews, with Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, and with the character of Shem in his last book (Shem is, among other of his very many kinships, a son of Noah, and he is compared with Jesus Christ, to the ironic denigration of both beings). The answer to the question of Joyce’s identification with Jews, Schapiro said, is that the Jew is at once alienated and indestructible, he is an exile from his own country and an exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history. In the unpredictable and fearful future that awaits civilization, the poet must be prepared to be alienated and indestructible. He must dedicate himself to poetry, although no one else seems likely to read what he writes; and he must be indestructible as a poet until he is destroyed as a human being. In the modern world, poetry is alienated; it will remain indestructible as long as the faith and love of each poet in his vocation survives.

1. Joyce’s two best works, Ulysses and his last book, are not poems in the ordinary sense of the word; and he wrote several volumes of poetry, most of which consist of verses far inferior to anything in his major books. But any view of poetry which excludes Finnegans Wake as a poem and Joyce as a poet merely suggests the likelihood that Joyce transformed and extended the limits of poetry by the writing of his last book. If we freeze our categories and our definitions, (and this is especially true in literature) the result is that we disable and blind our minds.

*

from T. S. ELIOT: A CRITICAL STUDY

Editor’s note

In the early 1940s, Delmore Schwartz signed a contract with James Laughlin—accompanied by the largest advance New Directions had yet paid—for a volume in Laughlin’s Masters of Modern Literature series of critical books devoted each to a single author. Schwartz chose T. S. Eliot as his subject. This was a busy and difficult time in Schwartz’s life, following the publication and resulting fame of his first book, when he was filled with ambition and energy, but he was also desperate for money, teaching uncertainly at Harvard, advising Laughlin on manuscripts for ND, and struggling with his marriage to Gertrude Buckman. Gertrude was working in an administrative capacity for New Directions, and the press’s offices were partially housed for a time in Schwartz’s Boston apartment.

In the correspondence between Schwartz and Laughlin, the Eliot book is mostly discussed in terms of money and the fulfillment of contractual obligations as Schwartz tried to goad Laughlin into freeing him to publish a novel with a bigger, more lucrative publisher—the abiding affection between the two men was often challenged by these kinds of exchanges, though they always, until near the end of Schwartz’s life, found a way back to friendship. The book became a low priority for Laughlin, and Schwartz’s energy and concentration eventually drifted elsewhere, mostly toward his sprawling and failed epic, Genesis.

But Schwartz idolized Eliot above almost all other authors, finding in him a model of the poet/critic/dramatist/editor and literature-altering figure he hoped to be. This necessarily resulted in ambivalence surrounding Eliot’s work and person—Schwartz felt mastered by Eliot, and also hoped to master him to become a great man himself.

Schwartz’s ambivalence, his frantic personality, and money difficulties made the Eliot book a near-impossible task. It was never finished, though Schwartz made many attempts, and it now survives in four disorganized folders in the Schwartz archive at Yale.

These folders contain several drafts of an introduction to the book, along with an aborted attempt at an entertaining anecdotal justification for writing the book and for Schwartz’s literary activities in general. This is the first time these pages have appeared in print. Also in the folders are many drafts of chapters on Eliot’s individual works—“Ash Wednesday,” “The Four Quartets”—as well as aspects of his style and innovations, with titles such as “Separation as A Subject” and “Manners and Morals as A Subject,” plus essays on Eliot’s dramatic works, criticism, and influence. There is even a complex attempt at understanding and almost forgiving Eliot’s anti-semitism.

Schwartz wanted to portray Eliot as the exemplary modern poet, the writer who actually brought on a new sense of the industrial world. Alas, he could not make it cohere. Nor could he even decide on a final form for the book, as various drafts indicate more or less formal and personal attempts at an overall scheme. A scholar might piece together a serviceable book from these folders, but it would probably offer little that other critics haven’t since said better.

What is most useful to readers now is the chance this writing offers to better understand Schwartz the thinker and critic and literary fan. In the pages that follow, we see a young poet grappling with the overpowering influence of his chosen master, layering his personal philosophy and sensibility into his reading of Eliot, who offered, Schwartz insisted, a new “sense of the actual.” Schwartz was increasingly tormented by his own shifting sense of actuality; what follows is one of his attempts at describing what seemed most true to him: literature.

THE REASON FOR WRITING THIS BOOK

In 1937, I lived in a rooming house near Washington Square. Because I read late at night and because it was difficult for me to fall asleep, I slept every morning until noon. I wrote all afternoon and then in the evening I went to the pictures, often walking the two miles to Times Square in order to do so, and going through the dark garment district of that part of the city until I came to the crowds moving about under the garish brilliance of Broadway. After the picture was over and I had left the theatre with my customary sense of guilt at the waste of an evening, I returned to the room where I lived with my brother and for the first time during the whole day enjoyed a genuine human relationship. All that I had done in that respect during the earlier part of the day was to tell the waitress behind the counter what I wanted for lunch and communicate in like terms with the waiter in a restaurant when I had my dinner. But when I came back from the movie, my brother was usually there and in bed, reading a tabloid. He had read my mail, which usually concerned literary matters, and we discussed these letters briefly. Then he began each night to tell me what had happened during the day at the office where he worked, a business concern which marketed artificial flowers and made a good deal of money, but not enough, it seemed, to keep the four brothers and their brother-in-law who owned the business on good terms with each other. [I would try with all the will in me to listen to my brother’s stories, but they scarcely ever interested me very much, and so I would soon find myself turning the pages of my brother’s tabloid while he continued to talk, wholly unaware of my lack of interest. Then he went to sleep usually, unless he had found some novel among my new books which interested him, and I sighed to think how far apart we were, although we had been in the same house and slept in the same bedroom almost always from the day he had been born.]1 These thoughts preoccupied me for a few moments, and then I would begin to read, placing four or five books beside my bed because I never could bring myself to believe that any one book would interest me sufficiently.

I came home one Saturday night in mid-winter and was surprised to find my brother there with his best friend.² I was surprised because Saturday night was their big night, the one on which they were determined to have a good time, or at any rate to stay out late. If they stayed out late they would not feel they weren’t making the best use of the one night of the week when they did not need to go to sleep and get up the next morning and to go to work.³

Neither of the boys had been paying any attention to the other. My brother Stanley was reading the evening edition of the next day’s Sunday paper and his friend Howard was studying the colored comics with profound attention, grunting now and then with amusement.⁴

Howard said to me: “We have just been talking about you and trying to decide why you spend your time the way you do, writing poems, stories, and reviews. What is it going to get you? No one or hardly anyone is interested in these things and you don’t make much money, do you?”

“No, I don’t, and you’re right, only about ten thousand people in the whole United States are truly interested; perhaps not even that many.”⁵

“Then why do you do it? How do you know that anything you write is any good? Here you are writing articles of criticism in which you say whether a book is good or not. Now what I want to know is, How do you know what is good?”

“Would you really like to know how I try to decide? Because I’ll tell you if you’re willing to listen to me.”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” he answered, “we were just getting ready to go out.”

Both boys arose, knowing they had left me in a lurch, in the middle of a sentence, so to speak. My brother, a person of infinite tact, said that he would like to hear about it tomorrow.⁶ But Howard could not suppress one parting shot—

“Just remember”, he said aggressively, “that a hundred and forty million human beings feel differently than you do and like the books you dislike and dislike the books you like, that is, if they waste any time paying attention to them. I don’t like the books you read, and I can’t even understand your poems or stories.⁷

The same kind of question arose in different forms upon other occasions and among other people. Once a relative of mine returned from a performance of “Mourning Becomes Electra” to ask why human beings, unhappy themselves, should be expected to enjoy and pay for a view of unhappiness for hours on end. On another occasion, another person looked at a story of mine and then at a poem; and then inquired why I never attempted to beautify anything.

DRAFT OF THE INTRODUCTION

T. S. Eliot is a great poet and the best literary critic in the English language.

I begin with this extreme statement so that the purpose of this book will be clear. Sainte-Beuve, a great critic, said that the purpose of the literary critic was to show the reader how to read more and more. This plain statement assumes that there are many ways in which to read the same book. By examining his own experience, the reader will remember how interesting and how illuminating the reading of other readers has often been. It is the best means of checking and extending and correcting our own experiences of the book. Do we not look at the introduction, converse about the book, and look for book reviews, always or chiefly with the purpose of seeing how our reading is the same or different from the experience of other readers? how we missed what other readers saw? how we projected into the book what was in our own existence, not in the book itself?

Implicit in this is the social nature of experience and of literature. Each one must read for himself, but he must be taught how to read by the society in which he exists and has come to belong. And each one’s understanding of the words which he reads is determined by the way in which words are used by society.

We must remember our own society as well as the poet and the reader when we come to the first metaphor in T. S. Eliot’s first book. This metaphor may very well be the beginning of modern American and English poetry, for it is likely that the reader will begin with this poem and this metaphor, when he begins to read the poetry of this age.

. . . . When the evening is stretched out against the sky,

Like a patient etherized upon a table

With this metaphor, J. Alfred Prufrock, the protagonist of the poem, begins to express—which means to press out what is within—his inner anguish of being.

To compare an evening sky to a patient upon an operating table is perhaps a forced comparison, considered in itself. For the visual image of the patient must be inverted; we must look down at the patient, but we must look up at the evening sky. What is important about the metaphor, considered as poetry, is the way in which two very different things have been joined. Considered in the most general way, within the context of how poetry is written in English, the important thing about this metaphor is the width of its sensibility or sensitivity. Although Keats studied to be a doctor, he could not have written such a metaphor; and neither Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, Rossetti, nor the poets of Yeats’ generation were capable of a consistent apprehension of experience in such a way. A conception of poetry and of the nature of the poetic prevailed, which prevented these poets from thinking in terms of such a metaphor. This very conception of the nature of poetry was itself installed by Wordsworth and Coleridge, who in turn introduced a sensibility or sensitivity different from the eighteenth-century conception of poetic style and diction.

Wordsworth, by means of a new poetic style, a new use of words, rhythms, and images, made possible a new consciousness of nature. Eliot and other modern poets have made possible a new consciousness of modern life.

Yet to speak in this way of a new consciousness of modern life is to risk a misunderstanding which has deceived many poets, critics, and readers. A poet does not achieve a new apprehension of experience merely because he writes about new experience, and many poets have made the error of supposing that they were holding a mirror up to nature because they wrote poems about the automobile or the railroad train. In the same way, some poets have been misunderstood and condemned because they did not write about automobiles, trains, and the industrial character of modern life. But to expect this of the poet is to expect him to be a camera, an automatic register of experience.

The new experience of modern life made possible by Eliot’s poetry is a new sense of the actual, new in that it joins for us things which in ordinary experience exist far apart from each other. Our sensitivity to experience has been widened not because two objects have been newly joined, but because the relevance of any two such objects to each other and to human thought and emotion has been shown.

It is thus essential to consider the actual, and the sense of the actual in Eliot’s poetry. The sense of the actual and the supreme power to grasp it has been one of the great virtues of Eliot’s poetry from the very start.

The actual is that which exists. It is not that which we would like to exist, nor what we hope will exist, nor what we are taught should exist. The failure to distinguish between what is actual and what is not is the cause of much weakness and blindness. The power to grasp the actual is also very important in any effort at understanding what is possible and what is ideal.

The actual is like a moist handshake, damp with nervousness or the body’s heat. This should suggest degrees of actuality and the difference between such a handshake and the gloved hand of an ambassador. The latter is also actual, but one has encountered less of the reality of the person.

“Rocks, moss, stone-crop, iron, merds,” as Eliot writes in one poem, are instances of actual things. But it would be wrong to suppose that things are more actual than feelings or motives. “I don’t like eggs; I never liked eggs” is an instance of how colloquial speech brings us an actual person, or a definite time and place. “Disordered papers in a dusty room” are an instance of the decay and disorder of the actual.

Yet the sense of the actual is narrow and deceptive when the actual is identified or limited to the sordid, the squalid, and the dirty. On the other hand, it is the refusal to admit or pay attention to this aspect of the actual which makes many human beings shut their eyes, draw the window shades, or seek out the many other devices for escaping from reality. Thus it is significant that in some of Eliot’s early poems there is an effort to satirize the genteel in speech and in manners. But if “carious teeth” are actual, the “inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold” is just as actual. And order is as actual as disorder. We are wrong only when we take the aspiration or the wish for order for actual order.

Hence Eliot as a critic speaks of the peculiar honesty of the great poet. This honesty is the moral quality of mind which insists upon knowing what is actual, no matter how unpleasant the judgement may be.

The actual eludes formulation because it is the foundation for all formulation and for all statements about what is true and what is not true. One must attempt definition merely by pointing. In the end, one must point to the color, blue, in order to identify it, and this pointing is useless, too, to the blind.

The sense of the actual must be refreshed repeatedly, and in the course of this book, the reader ought to try what is said and what is cited by invoking his own sense of what is actual. As the reader continues to examine Eliot’s work and this effort to describe his work, the actual and the sense of the actual will turn out repeatedly to be the very heart, the inner warmth and source of movement, of the subject.

The progress of poetry—the process by which one method and style of writing is succeeded by a new one—is inspired by the way a given convention of style that once made possible the experience of the actual has been made habitual and stock, to the point at which, instead of helping the poet to arrive at the actual, it is a block or barrier between him and his subject. It is also a barrier between a new kind of poetry and a reader who is devoted to the style of a previous period. The style and idiom of Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poetry was the barrier which Eliot had to break through when he began to write poetry, and it was precisely the familiarity with this kind of poetry which made his new work seem wrong and unpoetic to habitual readers of poetry. Such a scorn is natural because it is natural for the reigning taste to take for granted and proclaim its universality.

1. Schwartz seems to have wanted to cut this bracketed portion, having handwritten the brackets and crossed it out on the typescript.

2. In the manuscript there is an illegible handwritten correction above “his best friend.”

3. There is more illegible handwriting around “would not feel.”

4. Schwartz’s brother’s name was actually Kenneth.

5. In the manuscript, “two thousand” is changed to “ten thousand.”

6. In the manuscript, “much more delicacy” is changed to “infinite tact.”

7. This couplet is inserted here in the manuscript with no explanation: “One of the low on whom assurance sits/Like a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.”