1 In the same letter to Blackmur, Aiken remarked on Stevens’ playfulness, and compared “The Comedian as the Letters C” favourably to The Waste Land: “I haven’t ever seen it suggested in any discussion of Stevens, he’s perhaps the more remarkable humorist in poetry: I mean, he carries humour farther into terms of poetry than has perhaps ever been done. This is something to shout about. Even his titles are like those changeable signs one used to see: they are funny and/or beautiful. Then finally, there is of course the extremely keen critical awareness knocking about everywhere under all this brilliant and delicious meringue of surface. Crispin is fuller of things than The Waste Land, and then some!” Years later he told Stevens that he had wanted to put the whole of “Comedian as the Letter C” in his Random House anthology, but could not convince the publisher (Letters 302).
2 A notable exception to this general neglect is John D. Margolis’ 1972 study, T.S. Eliot’s Intellectual Development 1922–1939. Margolis not only stresses that Eliot had a Humanist phase, but he goes further and maintains that he never fully abandoned the values and predilections of Humanism: “Though he was uneasy with the secular character of Babbitt’s humanism and was troubled by the ambitions for the movement of such disciples as Foerster, Eliot could never dismiss the New Humanism completely. To disavow Babbitt’s philosophy would be at the least disingenuous; he had absorbed his professor’s ideas so thoroughly that, by now, there was no recanting. He had, however, gone beyond Babbitt’s humanistic traditionalism to religious orthodoxy, and he now felt challenged to bring to bear upon the movement to which he owed so much the insights of his recent development. His approach continued to be that of a sympathetic – indeed, committed – critic” (124–5). Margolis ignores the influence of Russell, which I believe to have been crucial. My belief is that it was only the Romantic-Classic opposition within the literary and cultural tradition that Eliot took from Babbitt (and Maurras) prior to his reconnection with Russell in 1914. James W. Tuttleton’s 1987 article “T.S. Eliot and the Crisis of the Modern” explores the ubiquity of Humanist sentiment in Eliot’s time and among his teachers, but stresses Eliot’s movement in the opposite direction from his contemporaries – from Humanism toward Christianity. He does not trace the unevenness of that movement, which is a focus of this study.
3 “The Search for Moral Sanction,” Listener 7 (30 March 1932) 446.2.
4 The Harvard milieu has been thoroughly investigated in the context of Eliot’s time there, but not so much for Stevens. For Harvard generally in that period see Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts 1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). For Eliot see Manju Jain, T.S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) devotes several pages to a discussion of the Harvard milieu as it impacted on both poets.
5 At least, if he did, Gallup missed it in his Bibliography. It is notable that Jonathan Culler chose not to reprint Stevens’ assessment of Eliot in his edition of the Harvard Advocate Centennial Anthology. In addition, Culler’s assessment of Stevens is rather dismissive, suggesting that “perhaps it was during his presidency [of the Harvard Advocate] that Stevens developed the dual sensibility that was to enable him to become both a vastly successful business executive and a major poet” (Culler 1966 xix). Hi Simons wrote to Stevens on 15 August1940 about the Eliot number of the Harvard Advocate, saying that he thought of suggesting that they do a Stevens number for his sixtieth year, but thought better of it: “When the Eliot issue came out in December 1938 I wanted to suggest to the Board that the October 1939 issue celebrate your sixtieth anniversary and the twenty-fifth year since the appearance of your first poem in Poetry. I dropped the notion, feeling that such a suggestion probably would be gratuitous coming from an non-Harvard man” (Huntington, Wallace Stevens Collection).
6 Holly Stevens missed this letter when she edited Stevens’ Letters. Kermode includes it in his selection of letters in Stevens: Collected Poems and Prose.
7 Robert McAlmon, travelling in Europe as a young man, corresponded with Stevens and reported to him (in an undated letter of 1922) on meeting Eliot: “One need not be too egotistically impressionable and broody; Eliot, I fear, is. One can become hardboiled; Rabelais did; so have some others. I don’t think Eliot will last long because one connects audacity, daring, something personally a little stronger than the soft haplessness of Eliot. The same despair, hardened, however, is about all that’s left anybody with sense, sensibility, or intelligence, in this industrial luxurious bigoted prohibitionary censuring economic organization that some like to call civilization, but my mind forgot these highly specialized terms about states of mankind” (Huntington, Wallace Stevens Collection). The Huntington does not have Stevens’ replies to McAlmon, but this opinion must have been reassuring at the time. Of course, McAlmon was proven wrong. It is worth noticing that, unlike Stevens and Williams, he accepted the general estimate of The Waste Land as expressing the despair that any sensitive person would feel in 1922. Perhaps one needed to be in Europe to feel that anxiety.
8 Total American casualties were 364,000, of which 126,000 were fatalities. While these are not trivial numbers for a country of not much more than 100 million at the time, they pale into insignificance beside the figures for the European combatants. (In addition more than half the American fatalities were due to the influenza epidemic of 1913/14 rather than combat.) France had 6,160,800 casualties, of which 1,350,800 were fatalities. And this is for a country with only 40 million inhabitants. The British Empire, much larger, had 3,190,235 casualties, of which 903,471 were fatalities. Germany and Austria together suffered 14,162,558 casualties, of which 2,973,700 were fatalities. The almost immediate acceptance of The Waste Land as an expression of postwar angst occurred mostly among Americans. The British were more inclined to be driven toward piety by the immense suffering and were little disposed to celebrate a poem registering the collapse of European Christian civilization. Lawrence Rainey points out that “it received very little media attention: three reviews in the wake of the Criterion publication, a further six after the Hogarth edition – and all but one of the nine were hostile. In the United States, in contrast, there were more than fifty reviews and notices of the poem, more or less equally divided between negative and positive evaluations” (Revisiting The Waste Land 116).
9 Between 1923 and the 1934 publication of “Eight Poems” in Alcestis, Stevens published only ten poems: “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” “Red Loves Kit,” “This Sun this March,” “Good Man, Bad Woman,” “Autumn Refrain,” “The Woman who Blamed Life on a Spaniard,” “Snow and Stars,” “Two Poems,” and “The Pleasure of Merely Circulating.” The publication of Ideas of Order in 1935 marked his return as an active poet. While personal factors cannot tell the whole story, his only child, Holly, was born in the summer of 1924, and Stevens was travelling a good deal for his employer in those years.
10 It is difficult to know just how familiar Stevens was with Eliot’s writing. Robert Moynihan notes in “Wallace Stevens’ Collection, Huntington Library,” Wallace Stevens Journal 20 (Spring 1996) that although Stevens “collected a good deal of T.S. Eliot ... the pages remain uncut if delivered that way” (77). Moynihan lists nineteen Eliot volumes in Stevens’ library, beginning with the 1923 Hogarth Press edition of The Waste Land. It seems unlikely that he did not read any of them, but clearly he did not read them all.
11 Ted Hughes takes this assessment much further in his commemorative talk, “A Dancer to God,” delivered on the Centenary of Eliot’s birth (Hughes 22–50) where he argues that Eliot’s poetry belongs in a thaumaturgic tradition. Stevens, I am sure, would not go so far, but I think Hughes’ sense that Eliot belongs to an archaic poetic mode is not alien to Stevens’ perception of the belatedness of his poetry.
12 José Rodriguez Feo bears witness to Stevens’ dislike of Eliot’s poetry: “I remember, on another occasion, when I asked him about Eliot he gave me the impression that he didn’t like Eliot very much. But he said to me that he was a good poet in the sense of the métier, he knew his poetry” (Brazeau 139).
13 Eliot, for his part, borrowed the title from Hugh l’Anson Fausset, The Modern Dilemma (Dent), which he reviewed in the Criterion X “Commentary” for January 1931. He dismissed Fausset’s argument, declaring that in reading it, he was “breathing the same old stuffy atmosphere of Matthew Arnold’s Cloud Cuckoo Land” (312).
14 This is from the first item in the series Eliot published a few years after his conversion (382.2): “The Modern Dilemma,” Listener 7; “Christianity and Communism” (16 March 1932) 382–3; “Religion and Science: A Phantom Dilemma” (23 March 1932) 428–9; “The Search for Moral Sanction” (30 March 1932) 445–6 and 480; and “Building up the Christian World” (6 April 1932) 501–2.
15 “Stevens seems to have accepted, as Royce did, Peirce’s system of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, where Firstness is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else; Secondness is the conception of being relative to, or in reaction with, something else; and Thirdness is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and a second are brought into relation. According to Stevens’ parable, Adam and Eve were the first humanists, because – like Descartes – they conceived the world in their own terms and practiced the attribute of reason in doing so. They had a second earth by construing the first in terms most favourable to themselves. They founded the enlightenment.” (Donoghue 310–11)
16 In a letter to Bertrand Russell responding to comments on The Waste Land that Russell had sent him, Eliot expressed regret for the breach that had arisen between them, adding: “I should like to see you very much – there have been many times when I have thought so.” (No precise date given, but 1922. Quoted in Ray Monk 2000 27. Original emphasis).
1 In a letter of 19 Nov. 1925 Stevens declined the suggestion that he review W.C. Williams’ In the American Grain for the Dial. (Letters 246). He declined to submit poems on both 8 Dec. 1926 and 3 Sept. 1927 (Letters 248 and 249). Of course, at this time he was not writing either prose or poetry – or at least not publishing any.
2 Leggett (p. 76): “He clearly saw her as the embodiment of a movement in contemporary poetry to which he himself was dedicated, and which he described in the thirties as the ‘new romantic.’ Long before their first meeting she is for him ‘one of the angels’ whose ‘style is an angelic style’ (Letters 290). What she is attempting in poetry ‘is really a good deal more important than what Williams does’” (Letters 278). Her style is “as unique as Gertrude Stein’s and ... makes Miss Stein seem shallow” (Letters 290). She is, in short, a model for the direction of contemporary poetry. And also on p. 82: “Stevens’ three accounts of the contemporary poet for whom he had the highest regard reveal more than anything else the degree to which his reading of contemporary poetry was dictated by his privileging of theory, so that a description of Moore’s verse is always subordinate to a conception of poetry.”
3 David E. Chinitz has given this remark considerable attention in T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide. He disputes the prevailing reading that the passage upholds “the need for an uncontaminated elite art.” On the contrary he believes that it renders “the boundaries between the high and the low more fluid [and affirms] the value of popular culture and ... the possibility of cross-over works” (59). His entire book persuasively articulates and defends this thesis.
4 The comment was made in a late letter, responding to Herbert Read’s review of a book by Edgar Wind in which he linked Eliot and Valéry. Eliot bristled at the association:
There is one point in your review which makes me writhe however, and that is your association of me and Valéry. I liked Valéry very much as a man and found him congenial company, and I have a photograph of him amongst the other friends above the mantle in my office. But as for his poetry, I always said that he seemed to write poetry only for the sake of analysing his own mind at work writing poetry. His reflections about his own poetry are his justification. I do not think you can bring that charge against me! I remember the warm approval of Henri Massis once when I said that I thought that Valéry’s poetry was a poésie de luxe. It seems to me that mine, on the other hand, fills Wind’s condition of being neither “engaged” nor “disengaged”; the best of it I have paid through the nose for in experience. (Letter to Herbert Read, 1 August 1963. Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria)
5 Leggett does not take into account the pure poetry movement, which derived from Valéry and from Henri Bremond’s 1926 book, La Poésie pure. Although I believe that Stevens’ thoughts on poetry at this time owe a good deal to Bremond and La Poésie pure, the discussion of that aspect of his assessment of Moore will have to wait until chapter six.
6 The poem was published in Owl’s Clover as “The Greenest Continent” but is not included in Collected Poems. Its subject is the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, begun on 2 October 1935. In December, the Italian general, Badoglio, used gas bombs against Ethiopian forces. The practice was effective and was used many more times by the Italians. The League of Nations proved unwilling to confront Italy over the invasion or the use of gas. For a discussion of the political pressures of the time see Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self 171–83.
Eliot’s response to the Italian campaign in “A Commentary” (Criterion 15 [Jan. 1936] 265–9) is tortuously ambivalent, and openly bigoted. He is in no doubt that the Ethiopians are indeed “inferior” to the Italians, but he nevertheless insists that their inferiority does not justify their exploitation – not to speak of wholesale slaughter. He is responding to right-wing opposition in France to the imposition of sanctions by the League of Nations:
But in the League of Nations, the constitution of which reflects, I think, the British liberal mentality rather than any other, there is room for a confusion of the religious and the secular. The charge brought by the French intellectuals of the Right, that the League of Nations has put higher and lower civilizations, superior and inferior nations, on the same level, is not without foundation; though we may remind them that it was not Britain that demanded the admission of Abyssinia [to the League of Nations]. There will probably always remain a real inequality of races, as there is always inequality of individuals. But the fundamental identity in humanity must always be asserted; as must the equal sanctity of moral obligation to people of every race. All men are equal before God; if they cannot all be equal in this world, yet our moral obligation towards inferiors is exactly the same, as that towards our equals (268).
Of course, such a mundane, and fundamentally temporal, event never finds its way into Eliot’s poetry.
7 The version of “The Steeple-Jack” now found in The Complete Poems has been revised from the version in Selected Poems.
8 “Mozart 1935” perhaps articulates his meaning. In that poem (discussed below) the pianist is said to play the present on a piano, despite the fact that the music he plays was composed by Mozart in the distant past.
9 The issue of the relation between art and the world is a recurrent theme in Romantic and post-Romantic literature from Shelley’s “Adonis,” through Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” to Yeats’ “Lapis Lazuli,” to name only prominent instances. Stevens’ lack of intimate knowledge of English poetry perhaps renders his intellectual struggle more opaque than it need be.
10 He uses the same term in the review: “It is clear enough ... to say that the romantic in the pejorative sense merely connotes obsolescence, but that the word has, or should have, another sense” (220).
11 Although he is very unsympathetic to Stevens, Denis Donoghue agrees that the issues between Eliot and Stevens – not that they ever debated them – concern reason, faith, and authority (in Shea 303).
12 It is a bit of a digression, but it is tempting to compare the “Chinese jar” of “Burnt Norton” to Yeats’ “Lapis Lazuli” and Stevens’ jar in Tennessee in “Anecdote of a Jar.” Whereas Eliot stresses the stillness of the Chinese jar – that is, its persistence – and Yeats stresses the detachment of the lapis lazuli figurine, Stevens stresses the connection between his jar and its surroundings, a connection that arises from its singularity:
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
1 Eliot admitted that the debate was motivated partly by a desire to create interest and boost circulation for their respective journals, but in retrospect it is clear that both men were seriously engaged in the issues, and drew others into the debate – which spilled over into the Pure Poetry controversy. See Jason Harding, Criterion 26–43, for a detailed discussion of this exchange and its motivation.
2 James Torrens, S.J. “Charles Maurras and Eliot’s ‘New Life’ PMLA 89 (March 1974) 312–22. We will return to Eliot’s relation with Maurras below.
3 Eliot returned to this declaration in “To Criticize the Critic,” a lecture delivered at the University of Leeds in July 1961, explaining that it was prompted by a visit from his old professor Irving Babbitt. On learning that Eliot “had recently been baptized and confirmed into the Church of England,” Babbitt said, “I think you should come out into the open.” As a consequence “the quotable sentence turned up in the preface to the book of essays I had in preparation, swung into orbit, and has been circling my little world ever since” (“To Criticize the Critic” 15).
4 Eliot’s comment in After Strange Gods on the remark in For Lancelot Andrewes does not much clarify matters. It is designed to decouple the political and cultural realms from the religious, while admitting that they are nonetheless related in his personal phenomenology:
Some years ago, in the preface to a small volume of essays, I made a sort of summary declaration of faith in matters religious, political and literary. The facility with which this statement has been quoted has helped to reveal to me that as it stands the statement is injudicious. It may suggest that the three subjects are of equal importance to me, which is not so; it may suggest that I accept all three beliefs on the same grounds, which is not so; and it may suggest that I believe that they all hang together or fall together, which would be the most serious misunderstanding of all. That there are connexions for me I of course admit, but these illuminate my own mind rather than the external world; and I now see the danger of suggesting to outsiders that the Faith is a political principle or a literary fashion, and the sum of all a dramatic posture. (27–8)
5 Chesterton’s political and social views were what – together with fellow Catholic convert Hilaire Belloc – he called “distributism.” Distributism owed a good deal to Ruskin. It recommended a return to pre-industrial economic organization in which everyone accepted a collective responsibility for the welfare of everyone else. Like Eliot, Chesterton thought that a successful community must be homogenous in terms of belief. Hence he was openly anti-Semitic for most of his career. His anti-Semitism was not racial, but religious. Like many other Christians, he berated the Jews for stubbornly rejecting the Messiah, who came among them. However, in a letter to the Jewish Chronicle published in September 1933 in the face of Nazi atrocities, he publicly renounced anti-Semitism.
6 Jacques Maritain. “Poetry and Religion,” Criterion 5 (Jan. 1927) 7–21; 5 (May 1927) 214–30. See Gallup for the attribution.
7 A Sermon Preached in Magdalene College Chapel (7 March 1948) 5. It was published as a pamphlet without any further bibliographical identification.
8 Eliot is, of course, referring to Pater’s famous remark, which was the watch-word of the aesthetic movement: “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end ... How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” (152).
9 1, 1922–23, no. 2 J.M. Robertson, “Flaubert” 105; 2, 1923–24, no. 6 “Evolution of English Blank Verse” 171; 3, 1924–25: no. 10 “A Naturalistic Theory of Hamlet” 172; no. 11 Review of Sidelights on Elizabethan Drama 456; 4, 1926 no. 2 “On Criticism” 44; 7 1928: no. 1 “Burns and his Race” 33; no. 2 “Burns and his Race” (concluded) 154; 8, 1929 no. 33 “The Scansion of Shakespeare” 635; 9, 1930 no. 35 “Shakespearean Idolatry” 246.
10 Incidentally, in this book Robertson mentions Eliot as having recently come to a more positive assessment of Arnold than he had previously held: “Even as a critic he is so far from being dismissed that one able modern who formerly assailed him, Mr. T.S. Eliot, has latterly paid him new tribute” (105). Robertson was probably thinking of Eliot’s remarks in his Introduction to The Sacred Wood (1920) cited below.
11 Principia Mathematica was written in collaboration with the older Alfred North Whitehead. It was published in three volumes 1910–13. The work was a great success. Its objective was to render logical argument as rigorous as mathematics through the use of symbols instead of words. As it turned out much of the work undertaken in Principia Mathematica – which built on the logic of the Italian G. Peano – had been anticipated by the Danish logician, Gottlob Frege. But Russell and Whitehead were unaware of Frege’s work while writing Principia. Frege is now regarded as the founder of the modern analytic tradition in philosophy (Monk Spirit 152).
12 Eliot’s recollection of his Irish nursemaid is a put-down of the following anecdote that Russell tells in Why I Am Not a Christian: “I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: ‘My father taught me that the question “Who made me?” cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question “Who made God ?” That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause’” (6) .
13 Robertson was a Scot. I suppose Eliot is denigrating his very robust atheism as just a faint survival of fundamentalist Presbyterianism in Scotland, known as Auld Licht. J.M. Barrie’s 1896 Auld Licht Idylls “celebrate” in an amusing manner the decline of that old form of Scottish worship: “There are few Auld Licht communities in Scotland nowadays – perhaps because people are now so well off, for the most devout Auld Lichts were always poor, and their last years were generally a grim struggle with the workhouse.”
14 Vivien Eliot sometimes spelled her name in the French manner, “Vivienne” as here, and sometimes in the briefer English manner, “Vivien.” I have opted for “Vivien” as briefer and easier to type.
15 For details on the relationship of Vivien and Russell see Carole Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow and Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude.
16 Jewel Spears Brooker has noted the importance of Arnold to Eliot’s aesthetic, particularly in the years between 1909 and 1911 (Brooker 1988 44).
17 Kenneth Asher, in T.S. Eliot and Ideology, accuses Eliot scholars of having neglected Eliot’s commitment to Maurrassian views, but there is a long tradition of excellent commentary on that relationship, beginning with Roger Kojecky, T.S. Eliot’s Social Criticism (London: Faber and Faber 1971). John D. Margolis’ study, T.S. Eliot’s Intellectual Development 1922–1939 – which was no doubt written before Kojecky’s article appeared. Kenneth Asher’s two useful commentaries on the relationship – T.S. Eliot and Ideology, and “T.S. Eliot and Charles Maurras” – had ample time to consult the earlier works. Asher does, however, add some details of interest. Jason Harding’s, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical networks in Inter-War Britain, while of great value in other ways, adds little to the other studies so far as Eliot’s relation to Maurras is concerned.
In defence of Asher’s claim that Eliot scholars have neglected the influence of Maurras, it is true that Lyndall Gordon makes no mention of him in any of her three biographies of Eliot. Nonetheless, Maurras receives at least a mention in most discussions of Eliot’s ideological posture.
18 Letter to Austin Warren, 11 Aug. 1929, quoted in Arthur Hazard Dakin, Paul Elmer More, note p. 269.
19 Margolis: “Perhaps, then, the example of Maurras led Eliot to take the step his French counterpart could not take, and follow his secular classicism to its religious conclusion in Catholicism. In such a case, Paul Elmer More may have been correct in suggesting the large part that Maurras played in Eliot’s conversion” (98). Asher’s view is somewhat different, assigning priority to Maurras’ political ideology: “Politics led Eliot to religion but he rarely acknowledged the political element that constituted a central part of what he understood – and in his writings intended – by his religion” (Eliot and Ideology 9). But I cannot accept Asher’s view that Eliot’s Anglicanism was merely expedient.
20 Maurras was arrested in September 1944, and sentenced to death for collaboration with the German occupiers. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, deprivation of civil liberties, and expulsion from the Académie française. Imprisoned in Riom and then Clairvaux, he was released in 1952 due to illness from which he did not recover.
21 It is true that Maurras did renounce atheism on his deathbed, and, returning to his natal faith, received the sacraments. It is not clear that Eliot was aware of that “apostasy” to Maurras’ Humanism.
22 Edward Lobb (1981), among others, attests to the importance of Arnold to Eliot’s social criticism, asserting that “Arnold’s definition of criticism might serve as a summary of all that Eliot found permanently useful in his thought” (76). However, he does not – nor does anyone else so far as I have discovered – draw attention to the Anglican Eliot’s felt need to distance himself from Arnold’s Humanism.
23 The Sacred Wood collects Eliot’s earliest essays, the most important of which – and most Arnoldian – is “Tradition and Individual Talent.” Eliot himself looks back on them, however, as “dating from a period when I was somewhat under the influence of Ezra Pound’s enthusiasm for Remy de Gourmont.” He adds: they have come “to seem to me the product of immaturity – though I do not repudiate ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’” (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 10).
Eliot’s taste for cryptic epigraphs can sometimes be helpful. For the introductory essay in The Sacred Wood he chose one from Rémy de Gourmont’s Lettres à l’amazone: “Eriger en lois ses impressions personnelles, c’est le grand effort d’un homme s’il est sincère.” (To erect his personal impressions as laws is the great effort of a man if he is sincere.) Although de Gourmont was hardly a Humanist, this particular sentiment is compatible with the Humanist project to replace superstitions with conscious fictions. In the preface to the 1928 reissue, Eliot acknowledges that “at that time” he was “much stimulated and much helped by the critical writings of Remy de Gourmont” (viii).
The title also alludes to Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough, whose first volume opens with the priest of Diana skulking about the sacred wood in which her shrine is located, hoping to avoid being assassinated by a would-be successor. Eliot presumably means us to think of successive poets and critics as similarly sanguine heirs to the priesthood of art. Certainly the collection of (mostly previously published) reviews that make up the volume eviscerates his elders. He does not at this time appear to have the “mythological method” in mind by this allusion to Frazer.
24 Lyndall Gordon remarks on the warmth of the relationship of Vivien and Tom with Violet and Sydney Schiff. She sees them as replacing Pound rather than Russell: “Another reason for the special tone of these letters is that Schiff seems to have replaced Pound as Eliot’s mentor when Pound left England towards the end of the Great War. At that point Eliot’s letters confide work plans, and reveal that he was showing Schiff work in progress” (Eliot’s New Life 682).
Oddly Gordon says almost nothing about the relationship of the Eliots with Russell despite its great intimacy. My supposition that the Schiffs replaced Russell is, I think, more plausible – not only because the relationship followed the break with Russell and preceded Pound’s departure for Paris, but also because, like Russell, the Schiffs gave the Eliots an entrée into English literary circles to which Pound had no access. In addition, the Schiffs had a country house to which the Eliots frequently repaired, as they had done with the country accommodations they shared with Russell.
25 As non-observant Jews and friends and admirers of Marcel Proust, the Schiffs were among the more gilded of contemporary Humanist patrons of the arts. When Scott Moncrieff died in 1936 before completing his translation of Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu Schiff was asked to finish the translation. The Schiffs held a salon in Paris as well as in London. It was at one of their parties that the famously unsuccessful meeting between Joyce and Proust took place. Sydney Schiff also supported Wyndham Lewis with “loans” and purchases of his paintings – though he was ill repaid by the satirical portrait of him in The Apes of God. Eliot published two short stories of Schiff’s in the Criterion: “The Thief” Criterion 1.2 (Jan. 1923) 188–91; and “Céleste” Criterion 2.7 (April 1924) 332–48 – the latter a fictionalized account of Proust’s death.
26 For Eliot’s attitude to pragmatism see: Donald J. Childs, “Risking Enchantment: the Middle Way between Mysticism and Pragmatism in Four Quartets” in Lobb, 107–130.
Eliot’s antipathy for pragmatism is not in doubt; as late as 1958, he castigated Herbert Read for a remark that he thought appeared too much like pragmatism (1 April 1958. Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria).
That the young Eliot – rather surprisingly – accepted the Spencerian perception that evolution was synonymous with progress is indicated by his graduate essay for Josiah Royce in which he protests “against the use of the expression “Evolution of Religion”: “The word evolution I believe is currently used with deplorable looseness. The sorts of fact, as I understand it, which can properly be described in terms of evolution are those in which a continuous relation between organic tendency and final environment can be expressed more or less quantitatively, according to a standard of value. We have the right to take human value as the standard for natural evolution, but what standard have we for religion or society?” (Gray 110, MSS 1–2). Darwin, of course, made no claim for any goal to the process of evolution, insisting on its randomness, qualified by adaptation to an environment, itself contingent and impermanent. Eliot objects, not to the Spencerian view of evolution, but to its application to religion.
27 Quoted by Paul Elmer More, in his review of Humanism in America, “A Revival of Humanism.” The Bookman [New York] 72 (March, 1930) 1–11, p. 10.
28 The essay is “Relation between Politics and Metaphysics.” See Douglass 1986, and Childs 1993 in Lobb 1997.
29 Although Einstein’s special theory of relativity was published in 1905, the work of Max Planck, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg on quantum physics – which introduced indeterminacy into the physicist’s picture of the world – still lay in the future.
30 The first study to examine carefully the import of Bradley’s philosophy on Eliot’s poetry was Anne C. Bolgan’s What the Thunder Really Said. As a graduate student Bolgan stumbled upon Eliot’s forgotten dissertation in the Harvard library and later persuaded him to publish it. As the title implies, her study focuses on The Waste Land.
Piers Gray’s T.S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development 1909–1922 (New Jersey: Harvester Press 1982) is more general, and places Eliot’s study of Bradley in the context of the anthropological thought of the period to which he was exposed.
More recently Jewel Spears Brooker’s Mastery and Escape: T.S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism re-examines the relationship between Eliot’s philosophical studies and his poetry.
While I am indebted to these studies, my perspective is somewhat different since I see Eliot’s engagement with Bradley as modulated by his contemporaneous engagement, both philosophical and personal, with Russell.
31 The following illustrates the tortured subtlety to which the monist must resort to maintain the possibility of knowledge without tumbling into either solipsism or dualism: “It is essential to the doctrine which I have sketched that the symbol or sign be not arbitrarily amputated from the object which it symbolizes, as for practical purposes it is isolated ... No symbol, I maintain, is ever a mere symbol, but is continuous with that which it symbolizes. Without words, no objects. The object, purely experienced and not denominated, is not yet an object, because it is only a bundle of particular perceptions; in order to be an object it must present identity in difference throughout a span of time” (Knowledge and Experience 132. My emphasis).
32 The paper was puckishly titled, “Seems, Madam? Nay, it is,” (Monk, Spirit 115).
According to G. Lowes Dickinson, a contemporary of Russell’s and the presiding academic for the cohort of Cambridge undergraduates following Russell, the Apostles was founded early in the nineteenth century by Tomlinson, afterwards bishop of Gibraltar. The meetings normally involved the reading of a paper by a member. During Dickinson’s tenure, the membership was largely homosexual. Other elder members in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and G.E. Moore. The next cohort included E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and John Maynard Keynes. For more on the Apostles, see Cline and Dickinson. This account is based on theirs.
33 He presumably meant destructive of Bradley’s metaphysics. Certainly, despite his claim in the “Conclusion” that he remained in substantial agreement with Bradley, the following statement is in direct contradiction of Bradley’s idealistic monism: “With regard to objects, I have reached the conclusion that all objects are non-mental; and with regard to mental activity, I conclude that we find only physiological activity or logical activity, both independent of, and more fundamental than what we call the activity of mind” (153).
Physiological and logical activity are, of course, not equivalent. His general point is that our psychological experience is epiphenomenal, that is, a sort of froth on the more substantial sea of either physiology or logic. If we admit only physiological activity, we are committed to behaviourism – to which Russell was strongly drawn at this time, though I cannot imagine that Eliot was. If we admit only logical activity, we are in agreement with Husserl’s phenomenology.
Eliot was familiar with Husserl’s phenomenology, for he alludes to him in his dissertation (138) together with Meinong – both of whom derive from Brentano, regarded as the founder of the phenomenological movement, one which regards mental phenomena as both real and directly accessible. He told Montgomery Belgion many years later (16 Feb. 1940. University of Victoria) that if he had continued in philosophy he would probably have ended up as “a sort of minor Husserl or Heidegger.” (Heidegger began his career as a student of Husserl’s.)
34 “As well as providing them with somewhere to live, Russell gave Eliot the income from £3,000 worth of engineering debentures (as a pacifist, he felt morally obliged to forgo the income from them), helped with their day-to-day expenses, paid for Vivien’s dancing lessons, and (according to Ottoline) lavished presents on Vivien of ‘silk underclothes and all sorts of silly things’” (Monk Spirit 442).
35 This favourable estimate of Santayana is at odds with what he wrote to Sydney Schiff, a few years later: “I have never liked Santayana myself, because I have always felt that his attitude was essentially feminine, and that his philosophy was a dressing up of himself rather than an interest in things. But then I think one ought to read “Reason in Common Sense” or one other volume. His Athenaeum things were exceptionally bad. He is not quite like any one else. Anyway, I shd. like to know what you think of him” (Aug. 1920. Letters 394).
36 T.S. Eliot, “A Commentary,” Criterion 12 (April 1933) 468–73 p. 473.
In this Eliot is in agreement with Roman Catholic teaching. Here is an excerpt from the entry on Idolatry in the Catholic Encyclopaedia:
But how many, or how few, of the countless millions of idolaters are, or have been, able to distinguish between the one Creator of all things and His creatures? and, having made the distinction, how many have been perverse enough to worship the creature in preference to the Creator? It is reasonable, Christian, and charitable to suppose that the “false gods” of the heathen were, in their conscience, the only true God they knew, and that their worship being right in its intention, went up to the one true God with that of Jews and Christians to whom He had revealed Himself. “In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ ... the gentiles who have not the law, shall be judged by their conscience” (Rom., ii: 14–16). God, who wishes all men to be saved, and Christ, who died for all who sinned in Adam, would be frustrated in their merciful designs if the prince of this world were to carry off all idolaters.
37 As a Bradleyan monist, Eliot denied that one could draw a sharp distinction between the imagined and the real, since all subsisted in the same state of being – perforce, since in monism there can, ex hypothesi, be only one state of being. Here are a couple of salient remarks from Knowledge and Experience:
With imaginary objects we come to a class which is frequently, under the name of assumptions, distinguished sharply from objects of belief, both true and erroneous. I cannot feel that this distinction is needed ... any object is real in so far as it is attended to, and that when we assert an error or hallucination, we attend not to the object itself but to the experience. (121)
... the apprehension of an object known to be imaginary does not differ essentially from the apprehension of any other object, unless we have hocus-pocussed an external reality to which ideas are to “conform.” (123) The latter remark, incidentally, is precisely the position Brentano adopts.
Both Meinong and Husserl descend from Brentano. That tradition was the principal antagonist to Russell’s logical atomism. Of course, most of us have “hocus-pocussed an external reality.” Most of us, in short, are Aristotelian dualists imagining – however loosely – that mental phenomena and physical phenomena are both real, and that each impinges on the other in some way about which we have not much thought.
38 “Finite centre” is Bradley’s term for the experiencing consciousness. The point of the term is to stress the partiality or limited nature of our consciousness as compared to the field of possible experiences, and also its particularity or singularity as compared to the universality of the Absolute. As the citation indicates, the finite centre must be distinguished from the self because it is only the experiencing aspect of the self – its feelings and emotions, abstracted from other features such as memory, volition, and so forth, which go together to make up the complete self.
39 Eliot was not entirely persuaded by the project of Principia Mathematica – the subject of the course he took from Russell at Harvard. He points out early in his dissertation on Bradley that Bradley’s position is in direct opposition to those of Russell and Moore (Knowledge and Experience 29n). Throughout the dissertation, he returns to this conflict. He cites Russell’s list of five theories of knowledge, and comments: “every one of these accounts is ultimately meaningless, owing to the confusion of the practical [Russell’s] with the metaphysical [Bradley’s] point of view” (88). Despite these gestures, Eliot ultimately abandons Bradleyan idealism, and it seems reasonable to suppose that Russell’s influence played a role.
When Eliot much later commends Principia Mathematica, in a Criterion “Commentary,” he does so by de-emphasizing its contribution to logic and mathematics, and stressing its importance for rhetorical clarity: “Young people who continue the study of English after they are fifteen or sixteen, ought to learn how the language has been formed, ought to learn something of both historical and comparative grammar, and come to understand how much the work of logicians has done to make of English a language in which it is possible to think clearly and exactly on any subject. The Principia Mathematica are perhaps a greater contribution to our language than they are to mathematics” Criterion 6 (Oct. 1927) 291.
40 Peter Ackroyd, for example, barely mentions Humanism in his 1984 biography, T.S. Eliot. His only mention is to refer to “Babbitt’s humanism,” which, he says, “Eliot was later to criticize,” while discussing Eliot’s undergraduate years at Harvard (36).
41 T.E. Hulme is a more plausible candidate for one whose views led Eliot toward Christianity – if not to Anglicanism. We know that Eliot admired Hulme’s critique of Humanism and insistence on the reality of Original Sin. His views are a more plausible candidate for the spur that led Eliot toward Anglicanism. But – even though he was first exposed to Hulme’s thought in 1916 – I will discuss Hulme’s influence when we come to Eliot’s conversion.
42 Although it was no doubt Russell’s intellect and philosophy that Eliot admired, rather than his personality, Russell was not without appealing personal features. The kindness he showed Eliot by offering to share his flat with the young couple and by assigning Eliot the income from debentures he held for the duration of the war must have been much appreciated.
43 The reviews and articles are: Theism and Humanism by A. J. Balfour. IJE, 26, (Jan. 1916) 284–9; The Philosophy of Nietzsche by A. Wolf (1915), IJE 26 (April 1916) 426–7; Conscience and Christ: Six Lectures on Christian Ethics by Hastings Rashdall. IJE, 27 (Oct. 1916) 111–12; Group Theories of Religion and the Religion of the Individual by Clement C. J. Webb. IJE, 27 (Oct. 1916) 115–17; “The Development of Leibniz’ Monadism” The Monist 26 (Oct. 1916) 534–56; “Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centers” The Monist 27 (1915–16) 566–76; Elements of Folk Psychology. Outlines of a Psychology’s History of the Development of Mankind by Wilhelm Wundt. Trans. E.L. Schaub. IJE 27 (Jan. 1917) 252–3; Religion and Science: a Philosophical Essay by John Theodore Merz. IJE. 27 (Oct. 1916) 125; Philosophy and War by Emile Boutroux. Trans. Fred Rothwell. IJE 27 (Oct., 1916) 128; The Ultimate Belief by A. Clutton Brock. IJE 27 (Oct., 1916) 127 [Gallup lists all the others, but missed this review]; Mens Creatrix by William Temple. IJE 27 (July 1917) 542; Religion and Philosophy by R.G. Collingwood. IJE 27 (July 1917); “An American Critic” The New Statesman 7 (24 June 1916) 234 (an unsigned review of Paul Elmer More’s Aristocracy and Justice); “Recent British Periodical Literature in Ethics,”IJE 28 (Jan. 1918) 270–77; “Style and Thought,” a review of Russell’s Mysticism and Logic. The Nation 22 (March 23, 1918) 94–5.
44 Lyndall Gordon has commented on several of these reviews. But where I see evidence of Humanist scepticism in them she sees Eliot expressing a dissatisfaction with a “too tepid, too liberal” version of the Christianity articulated in the books reviewed (109–10). John Margolis has also examined them. He starts from the assumption that Eliot was a Humanist at the time, and finds glimmerings of religious interest (16–21). My reading is closer to Margolis than to Gordon, but differs from both.
45 In his dissertation Eliot cites Lévy-Bruhl’s theory of a primitive participatory mentality that is distinct from the civilized man’s analytic mentality, setting it against Russell’s epistemology: “The theory of Meinong starts from the postulate of the reality of objects – everything that is real is an object. Mr Russell starts apparently from the reality of universals and sense-data, and from these elements late in the order of knowledge he builds up the external world” (105).
He appends the following note to “order of knowledge”: “ Cf. ‘...La mentalité des sociétés inférieures ... comporte bien des représentations abstraites, et des représentations générales; mais ni cette abstraction, ni cette généralité ne sont celles de nos concepts.’ Lévy-Bruhl, Les Fonctions Mentales, p. 137.” [“The mentality of inferior societies ... includes several abstractions and general terms, but neither this abstraction nor this general term is that of our concepts.”]
46 Here is Robertson’s uncompromising assessment of Arnold’s behaviour: “In the end we find him not only denying the divinity of Jesus and insisting, with Renan, that miracles do not happen, but profanely deriding the doctrine of the Trinity and explaining that no real meaning can be attached to the name God save ‘Something not Ourselves which makes for Righteousness.’ And all the while he goes habitually to church, regularly takes the Holy Sacrament, turns to the East at the traditional or psychological moment, hymns the Church of England and the most reasonable of Establishments, and pleads unwearyingly for the literary use of the Bible in the school and the home” (Modern Humanists Reconsidered. London: Watts 1927 125).
47 Here is Monk on Russell’s intervention:
The weekend that Eliot went to Garsington [April 1917] he was supposed to be sailing back to the United States to sit his postgraduate examinations in philosophy at Harvard. It was an obligation that Russell had helped to get him out of by sending a telegram to Elio’s father saying: “STRONGLY ADVISE CABLING TOM AGAINST SAILING UNDER PRESENT PECULIARLY DANGEROUS CONDITIONS UNLESS IMMEDIATE DEGREE IS WORTH RISKING LIFE.” Eliot’s father professed himself “not greatly pleased with the language of Prof. Russell’s cablegram,” and his mother wrote to Russell to say she was “sure your influence in every way will confirm my son in his choice of philosophy as a life work,” and confirming that she herself had “absolute faith in his Philosophy but not in the vers libre.” For the time being, at least, the intervention had achieved its aim of keeping Eliot in London. (Monk Spirit, 454)
48 Donald Gallup’s suggestion that Appleplex is modelled on Ezra Pound has long been accepted, but the fit is very poor. Pound can hardly be described as someone who “studied the physical and biological sciences.” Russell seems to me a much more plausible candidate. See Donald Gallup, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound: Collaboration in Letters. Seymour-Jones also speculates that Russell was the model for Appleplex (Painted Shadow 200–2).
The story has not drawn a lot of comment. Christopher Ricks in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice comments on it at some length (115–22) but ignores the biographical context, summing it up as about “being able to be neither comfortable nor altogether uncomfortable with stereotypes” (118). He returns to the story (still Part I), placing the murder “in Gopsum Street” in the context of a murder reported in newspapers (130–2).
Kristian Smidt in Poetry and Belief in the Work of T.S. Eliot also discusses it only in terms of its philosophical and religious implications. Both assume that Eeldrop is Eliot, but neither speculates on the identity of Appleplex. And Smidt attributes the opinions of both interlocutors to Eliot.
49 This remark seems to conflate attitudes of both Bradley and Russell. Bradley, of course, concentrated on the individual (the “finite centre”) as the only ethical agent. Russell, for his part denied that universals had any meaning. In his logic, only definite references to specific entities carry meaning.
50 Seymour-Jones identifies Vivien as the target of the ridicule (Painted Shadow 200–2), but she has no evidence to support the allegation, and it seems unlikely on internal evidence.
51 Being only a little shy of thirty, with an ill wife, and a not terribly robust constitution, Eliot would have had little prospect of being placed in the infantry in the American army. Though his education would certainly have assured him a commission, infantry subalterns had the highest casualty rates of all ranks in the British army. The fate of T.E. Hulme – older than he – and Jean Verdenal, among countless others, would not have been lost on him.
52 Lyndall Gordon suggests that Eliot rather unkindly used the women in his life to feed his poetry:
It is curious how each [woman] was absorbed into what seems an almost predetermined pattern. Emily Hale prompted the sublime moments; Vivienne, the sense of sin, as well as providing, throughout the first marriage, the living martyrdom. Later, sensible, efficient Mary Trevelyan served her long stint as support during the years of penitence. For her their friendship was a commitment; for Eliot quite peripheral. His passion for immortality was so commanding that it allowed him to reject each of these women with a firmness that shattered their lives. At the same time, his poetry and plays transformed them as the material of art. As such, Emily and Vivienne became allegorical emblems of vision and horror that take his works to the frontiers of experience, and beyond. (“Eliot and Women” in Bush 1991 20)
And Seymour-Jones portrays Eliot as a very inadequate husband indeed. Neither, I think, gives sufficient weight to the degree Eliot may have been damaged by Vivien’s adultery with Russell.
53 In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty characterizes the critic as an “ironist” capable of a benign “double talk,” or mimicry. She is “willing to refrain from epistemology – from thinking that there is a special set of terms in which all contributions to the conversation should be put – and ... willing to pick up the jargon of the interlocutor rather than translating it into ... [her] own.” This is the hermeneutic activity, Rorty says, of “imitating models ... of phronesis rather than epistemon” – that is, of thought (or opinion) rather than knowledge (318, 319). Certainly this is not a mode of intellectual conduct that Eliot could have adopted.
54 Seymour-Jones (Painted Shadow passim) believes that Eliot knew of it from very early in the relationship, and that he tolerated it for economic reasons and to advance his career: “It was Russell’s payment of the Eliots’ everyday bills, as well as the ‘extras’ they both considered essential, which subsidised a life style well beyond their means and enabled them to mix with the Bloomsbury group, many of whose members practised a similar “open marriage” to that of Tom and Vivien ... It was a bohemian ethos in which the Eliots felt comfortable, one in which bourgeois conventions had long ago been abandoned” (154). Whatever Eliot may have suspected of the relationship, it is inconceivable to me that he would have been willing to profit from his wife’s infidelity, as Seymour-Jones implies.
1 Lyndall Gordon dates it as prior to January 1915 (Imperfect 540), on the flimsy grounds of Eliot’s mention of Priapism in a letter to Pound of 2 February 1915 (Letters 85). But Eliot is clearly referring to one of the Bolo poems in that letter, complaining that Lewis had declined to print it in Blast. All that can be said for certain of the date is that it was written before September 1916, when it appeared in Poetry – minus the line, “He laughed like an irresponsible foetus,” which Harriet Monroe excised without asking permission (Letters 223). It seems likely that it was written not long before that, because in a letter to Monroe of 7 June 1916 declining to send her “Prufrock,” Eliot offered “Portrait” and “La Figlia che Piange” instead – which we know were written long before – but did not offer “Mr. Apollinax.”
In the event, a quartet of poems appeared in the September issue of Poetry entitled “Observations.” It included “La Figlia che Piange,” “Conversations Galantes,” “Morning at the Window,” and “Mr. Apollinax,” but not “Portrait.” The last three appear to be of recent composition, though we have no dates for them. Eliot obviously sent them sometime after 7 June, but the only one mentioned in the letter is the 1911 poem “La Figlia che Piange.” It seems probable that all of these poems were in a drawer, as opposed to being written for the occasion, for he told Conrad Aiken in a letter of 21 August 1916 that he had not written “a line” of poetry (Letters 144).
2 The Fuller identification is Lyndall Gordon’s (Imperfect 29). Valerie Eliot (Letters 483) thinks that Professor Channing-Cheetah is based on William Henry Schofield, a much older Harvard professor. Fuller was only nine years older than Eliot – the same age as Stevens, in fact. Monk, in The Spirit of Solitude, leaves no doubt, that Russell and Eliot did spend a weekend at the country house of Professor Fuller (353). If Eliot led Valerie to believe that it was Schofield’s, he must have transposed Schofield onto the Fuller social occasion – a licence that we grant to poets. Monk does not mention that Eliot and Russell first met at Mrs Gardner’s house. Donald J. Childs reports that Eliot himself confirmed that Schofield was the model. (“‘Mr. Apollinax,’ Professor Channing-Cheetah, and T.S. Eliot,” Journal of Modern Literature 13 [March 1986] 172–7.) He notes the irony that Schofield – the archetypal New Englander in ‘Mr. Apollinax’ – was not even an American, but ... a Canadian” (177). However, the identity of the ridiculed Harvard professor is not crucial to my argument.
3 Valerie Eliot prints three letters from Eliot to Mrs Jack Gardner. They are all respectful, and report on his literary activities and the painting scene in London. It is clear that he regarded her as a useful contact at Harvard, and went out of his way to maintain cordial relations. I don’t know if she saw “Mr. Apollinax,” or if she recognized herself in it, if she did see it.
4 The following epigraph is not in Collected Poems, nor in The Little Review, nor in the British edition of Collected Poems 1909–1935. However it is in the corresponding American edition: New York: Harcout, Brace & Co. 1930: “Similiter et omnes revereantur Diaconos, ut mandatum Jesu Christi; et Episcopum, ut Jesum Christum, existentem filium Patris; Presbyteros autem, ut concilium Dei et conjunctionem Apostolorum. Sine his Ecclesia non vocatur; de quibus suadeo vos sic haber. S. IGNATII AD TRALLIANOS.” [Likewise, let all respect the deacons as Jesus Christ, even as the bishop is also a type of the Father, and the presbyters as the Council of God and the college of Apostles. Without these the name of “Church” is not given. I am confident that you accept this.] The passage is from St Ignatius of Antioch’s epistle to the Turkish city of Tralles. See “Ignatius to the Trallians,” III. 1–2, in The Apostolic Fathers, with a translation by Kirsopp Lake (London: William Heinemann, 1919), I, 215.
It is not entirely clear to me what this epigraph adds to the import of the poem. If read ironically, it underlines the extravagant claims the Church makes for its clergy. Eliot apparently decided it was not worth retaining, for this is the only time it is attached to the poem. Certainly it would not fit the later views of the Anglican Eliot.
5 I am not aware that Eliot ever confirmed that he had Gautier’s poem in mind, but the opening lines of his poem – “The broad-backed hippopotamus / Rests on his belly in the mud” – might be thought to echo the opening line of Gautier’s: “L’hippopotame au large ventre.” Beyond that there is scarcely any verbal similarity – though both ridicule piety. However, without the allusion, Eliot’s choice of an hippopotamus as the vehicle of his ridicule seems infelicitous – especially since Eliot does not exploit – as Gautier does – the massive invulnerability of the Hippopotamus to any assault. Moreover, Gautier attributes the armour of faith to himself, rather spiking any ridicule of believers.
6 Eliot may have had in the back of his mind the following passage from Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy – a work he knew well (238–9) on a Scottish writer celebrating the fecundity of the British lower classes, which Arnold then mocks:
“We move to multiplicity,” says Mr. Robert Buchanan. “If there is one quality which seems God’s, and his exclusively, it seems that divine philoprogenitiveness, that passionate love of distribution and expansion into living forms. Every animal added seems a new ecstasy to the Maker; every life added, a new embodiment of his love. He would swarm the earth with beings. There are never enough. Life, life, life, – faces gleaming, hearts beating, must fill every cranny. Not a corner is suffered to remain empty. The whole earth breeds, and God glories.”
Arnold comments:
It is a little unjust, perhaps, to attribute to the Divinity exclusively this philoprogenitiveness, which the British Philistine, and the poorer class of Irish, may certainly claim to share with him; yet how inspiriting is here the whole strain of thought! and these beautiful words, too, I carry about with me in the East of London, and often read them there ... And when the story is perfectly revived, the swarming quite completed, and every cranny choke-full, then, too, no doubt, the faces in the East of London will be gleaming faces, which Mr. Robert Buchanan says it is God’s desire they should be, and which every one must perceive they are not at present, but, on the contrary, very miserable.
It seems unlikely that the punctilious Eliot would have carelessly substituted “Polyphyloprogenitive” for Arnold’s “philoprogenitive,” so I assume that the emendation was deliberate – if, indeed, he had Culture and Anarchy in mind at all. Moreover, the occasion of Arnold’s use of the term is remote from Eliot’s.
In A Student’s Guide the resourceful B.C. Southam identifies an alternate candidate. He points out that Friedrich Strauss used the term “philoprogenitive” in A New Life of Jesus (1865 English translation, II, 41) “in a discussion of the ‘myth’ that Jesus was ‘begotten’ by the Holy Ghost” (61). This usage is certainly closer to the theme of the poem, but it is still not an occurrence of “polyphyloprogenitive.”
7 B.C. Southam in his Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1994 117) speculates that the allusion is to Piero Della Francesca’s “Baptism” in the National Gallery, London. However, Piero does not belong to the Umbrian school, and while his painting does have a hovering dove, neither Christ’s nor John the Baptist’s feet are immersed in water as they are in Perugino. God the Father is not depicted in either Francesca’s or Perugino’s “Baptism.”
8 Throughout his life Eliot evinces an ambivalence toward mystical visions. For a recent discussion of this ambivalence see Paul Murray, T.S. Eliot and Mysticism. Despite Eliot’s denials, Murray concludes – on the evidence of Four Quartets – that “the vision communicated in his poetry of the Timeless Moment is, I think, an authentic expression of a state of soul that one can only call mystical” (257).
9 That Eliot was interested in the phenomenon of mystical experience cannot be denied, even if it is doubtful – despite Lyndall Gordon – that he had any experiences that he would himself classify as mystical. He did, however, famously compare the involuntary component of literary composition to mystical experience in a review of the Pensées of Pascal: “You may call it communion with the Divine, or you may call it a temporary crystallization of the mind. Until science can teach us to reproduce such phenomena at will, science cannot claim to have explained them; and they can be judged only by their limits” (Selected Essays 405).
10 In the draft version, as printed in Inventions of the March Hare, in place of the lines: “Along the garden-wall the bees / With hairy bellies pass between” Eliot had: “Salmon stretched red along the wall / “Sweet peas invite to intervene / The hairy bellies of the bees.” Presumably he wanted to introduce the salmon for their well-known suicidal spawning run, but the line is difficult to construe, and brings to mind gutted salmon drying along the wall more than spawning salmon swimming upstream.
11 In his 1921 review in Lewis’ Tyro, Eliot bemoaned the lack of myths in his time, which, he says, leads to a fruitless nihilism: “But in our time, barren of myths – when in France there is no successor to the honnête homme qui ne se pique de rien [the plain man whom nothing upsets] and René, and the dandy, but only a deliberate school of mythopoetic nihilism – in our time the English myth is pitiably diminished” (“The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism”). I suggest that he was thinking of his own war-time poetry.
I’m not sure what Eliot has in mind as the “English myth,” but he goes on to complain of its “degenerate descendent, the modern John Bull, the John Bull who usually alternates with Britannia in the cartoons of Punch.” I suppose he might have in mind Arthurian legends.
12 We will return to the question of the attitudes of Eliot and Stevens toward the irrational when we come to the question of pure poetry in chapter 5.
13 “There is a difference between them [science and poetry ] and it is the difference between logical and empirical knowledge. Since philosophers do not agree in respect to what constitutes philosophic truth, as Bertrand Russell (if any illustration whatever is necessary) demonstrates in his Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, even in the casual comment that truth as a static concept is to be discarded, it may not be of much use to improvise a definition of poetic truth” (Kermode 676).
14 Jacqueline Vaught Brogan mentions some of these annotation in a note: “The marginalia of Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism (New York: MacMillan, 1895), now held at the Huntington, reveals Stevens’ interest in very disinterested criticism, since he has marked Arnold’s assertion that ‘Criticism must maintain its independence of the practical spirit and its aims’ (34); yet it also shows Stevens’ interest in the political function of the ‘creative power,’ since he has also marked the passage in which Arnold praises Burke for bringing ‘thought to bear upon politics.’ (n4, 188).
15 A statement such as “I was the world in which I walked,” leaves Stevens open to the charge of solipsism, but the charge is unjustified, for reasons that Eliot himself outlines in his dissertation on Bradley:
So far as experiences go, we may be said in a sense to live each in a different world. But “world” in this sense, is not the world with which solipsism is concerned; each centre of experience is unique, but is unique only with reference to a common meaning ... And inasmuch as the finite centre is an experience, while the self is one aspect in that experience, and again contains and harmonizes several experiences, we may say that the self is both less and more than such a centre, and is ideal. For this reason it is more correct to say that a self passes from one point of view to another ... Thus we may continue to say that finite centres are impervious. Identity we find to be everywhere ideal, while finite centres are real. (Knowledge and Experience 149)
The consequence of such relativistic idealism is that, although each individual’s awareness is limited and partial, we – each of us – are unaware of that partiality. We each inhabit a world that is experientially distinct and peculiar to each of us, even though the world is external to us and always remains whatever it is. Of course, there is a good deal of overlap between your experience and mine, but there is no way for either of us to know precisely where the overlap fails. As Eliot famously puts the dilemma in Part V of The Waste Land: “We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”
16 “Finite centre” is Bradley’s term for the experiencing consciousness. The point of using such a term is to stress the partiality or limited nature (finitude) of our consciousness as compared to the field of possible experiences, and also its particularity or singularity (“centre”) as compared to the universality of the Absolute. As the citation indicates, the finite centre must be distinguished from the self because it is only the experiencing aspect of the self – its feelings and emotions, abstracted from other features such as memory, volition, and so forth which go together to make up the complete self.
17 This sentiment expressed in “Sunday Morning” is akin to Russell’s remarks in his 1910 essay “Mysticism and Logic”: “If we are not to be led into false beliefs, it is necessary to realise exactly what the mystic emotion reveals. It reveals a possibility of human nature – a possibility of a nobler, happier, freer life than any that can be otherwise achieved. But it does not reveal anything about the non-human, or about the nature of the universe in general. Good and bad, and even the higher good that mysticism finds everywhere, are the reflections of our own emotions on other things, not part of the substance of things as they are in themselves” (Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays 28). I do not suggest that Stevens had read “Mysticism and Logic.” My purpose is simply to point out the similarity of Russell’s avowedly Humanist views and those expressed in “Sunday Morning.”
18 Although Sassoon was two years Eliot’s senior, he patronizes him as a “youth” and takes the trouble to note his Jewish ancestry. Sassoon’s father was a non-observant Jew, but his mother was an Englishwoman. The elder Sassoon abandoned his wife and family for another woman, but continued to support them. Siegfried was raised by his mother as an Anglican and a country gentleman.
19 His correspondence at the time corroborates that he was not writing, but not that he had lost interest in poetry. For example he complained to Conrad Aiken in a letter of 1916: “Of poetry I have not written a line; I have been far too worried and nervous. I hope that the end of another year will see me in a position to think about verse a bit” (Letters 145).
20 This is the same defence that Ron Schuchard offers in “Burbank with a Baedeker.” He is speaking of the infamous remark in After Strange Gods, but in the context of a reading of “Burbank with a Baedeker”: “To Eliot, any large number of free-thinking New Humanists – or any secular humanists, Christian or Jewish – would be intellectually “undesirable,” for in diminishing the role of religion in culture they would threaten the very project of reestablishing a traditional, religion-based culture” (53). However, there is no good evidence that Eliot was committed to “reestablishing a traditional religion-based culture” in 1919 – as he certainly was in, say, 1933.
21 The issue of Eliot’s alleged anti-Semitism is not one that I wish to engage. There is no question that he harboured religious and ethnic prejudices toward Jews – as did most of his class and religious upbringing in the United States in those years. And as a Christian convert who believed that a healthy society required a large degree of homogeneity of religious belief, he was ideologically hostile both to practising Jews and (infamously) to free-thinking Jews. All of that must be conceded; what remains at issue is to what extent those predilections and attitudes constitute a culpable ethical failure, one that vitiates his entire literary achievement. It is that question that I wish to put aside.
For those interested in the question, the most thorough airing of the matter of which I am aware is the “Special Section: Eliot and anti-Semitism, the Ongoing Debate” in Modernism/modernity 10 (Jan. 2003) 1–70.
For the contrasting case of Ezra Pound, I recommend my study Pound in Purgatory.
22 Eliot delivered a paper entitled “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual” on 9 December 1913 in Royce’s seminar (cited at length in Piers Gray 108–74). In it he discusses Frazer’s theories as well as Durkheim’s.
23 In the essay he wrote for Royce in his last year at Harvard (1913–14), “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual,” Eliot referred specifically to Frazer’s scepticism about the Christian story: “I have not the smallest competence to criticise Dr. Frazer’s erudition, and his ability to manipulate this erudition one can only admire. But I cannot subscribe for instance to the interpretation with which he ends his volume on the Dying God” (cited by Piers Gray 130). But that was not his opinion in 1921.
24 For example, Eliot wrote to Sydney Schiff, in a letter written from the Albermale Hotel at Margate, in November 1921: “I have done a rough draft of part of part III, but do not know whether it will do, and must wait for Vivien’s opinion as to whether it is printable” (Letters 484).
For a detailed account of the chronology of The Waste Land’s composition see Lawrence Rainey, Revisiting “The Waste Land.”
25 Lawrence Rainey’s recent thorough and authoritative study of The Waste Land’s genesis in Revisiting “The Waste Land” disappointingly does not address the question of why Eliot was determined to write a long poem. What his study does show – unequivocally – is that the long poem does not come naturally to Eliot, for his study confirms what has long been known: that The Waste Land was cobbled together from fragments, some written many years earlier. Eliot needed the guidance – or perhaps just the moral support – of Ezra Pound to mould those fragments into a none-too-coherent poem. On the unity of the poem, see especially pages 39–40 of Revisiting.
26 It is outside the scope of this study, but one inspiration for multi-voiced poetry sequences was probably radio drama. Pound invoked that parallel in a letter of 29 November 1924 to his father, explaining how he could navigate The Cantos: “Simplest parallel I can give is radio where you tell who is talking by the noise they make” (quoted in my study of Pound’s Cantos, A Light from Eleusis 126; Beinecke, Pound Collection).
27 Although very different in tone, these lines from The Waste Land express the same disillusionment with the Resurrection as the following lines from Stevens’ “Sunday Morning”: “The tomb in Palestine / Is not the porch of spirits lingering. / It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
28 Here is Weston’s description of her thesis: “Were Grail romances forbidden? Or were they merely discouraged? Probably we shall never know, but of this one thing we may be sure, the Grail is a living force, it will never die; it may indeed sink out of sight, and, for centuries even, disappear from the field of literature, but it will rise to the surface again, and become once more a theme of vital inspiration even as, after slumbering from the days of Malory, it woke to new life in the nineteenth century, making its fresh appeal through the genius of Tennyson and Wagner” (From Ritual to Romance 188). For a consideration of the relation between The Waste Land and From Ritual to Romance, see my study The Birth of Modernism.
29 Pound’s early poetry had lots of Yeatsian magic and mysticism, but not the Frazerian feature of comparative mythology, which is so important in The Waste Land.
30 Seymour Jones thinks that the strain of a visit from Eliot’s mother and sister, beginning on 10 June 1921, helped to precipitate Eliot’s mental breakdown, leading to his treatment at Lausanne in October. His mother and brother stayed at the Eliots’ Clarence Gate Gardens flat, while Tom and Vivien moved in with Lucy Thayer. “Coming face to face after six years with this formidable matriarch,” Seymour Jones remarks, “was a considerable shock to Tom, banishing the false and sentimental memories of childhood recalled from the safety of England, and reviving the fear and sulky obedience of the years in St. Louis” (281). Adding to the strain was Charlotte Eliot’s refusal “to change her will so that Eliot would inherit his share unencumbered. She insisted on excluding Vivien from any inheritance” (283).
31 For an excellent and detailed account of Eliot’s engagement with the Criterion, see Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical networks in Inter-War Britain. Terry Eagleton’s brilliant review of Harding’s book puts the purpose and demise of the Criterion as cogently as one could wish:
The second depression of spirits gripped Eliot in October 1938, in the wake of the Munich pact between Hitler and Chamberlain. Three months later, the Criterion folded – partly because of the material complications of the advent of war, but no doubt because of its spiritual implications, too. For the war meant that the Criterion’s project to rebuild a cultural equivalent of the Holy Roman Empire had collapsed, giving way to an altogether more sinister sort of European empire; and Eliot observed glumly in the final edition of the journal that “the ‘European Mind,’ which one had mistakenly thought might be renewed and fortified, disappeared from view” (Terry Eagleton, “Nudge-Winking”).
32 It is true that Stevens had a fairly close relationship with Santayana while an undergraduate, and there is no doubt that Santayana’s scepticism had some influence on Stevens’ thought and his “belief system.” But there is no evidence that he had the sort of intense attraction to Santayana, followed by repulsion, that we have seen in Eliot’s relation with Russell. Nor, of course, was there any personal grievance between the two men as there was between Eliot and Russell. For Santayana’s influence on Stevens see Milton J. Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self, passim.
33 Apart from undergraduate poems published in the Harvard Advocate, Stevens’ first published poem was “Carnet de Voyage” – actually a sequence of poems – published in the Trend 8 in September 1914. They were not included in Harmonium.
34 The litany is a prayer, repeatedly asking the Virgin to intercede for the penitent in various guises, that is, with different attributes. The most popular in the twentieth century was the Litany of Loreto, from which the following are taken: “Mother of divine grace, pray for us. / Mother most pure, pray for us. / Mother most chaste, pray for us. / Virgin most prudent, pray for us. / Virgin most powerful, pray for us. / Seat of wisdom, pray for us. / Mystical rose, pray for us. / Tower of ivory, pray for us. / House of gold, pray for us. / Morning star, pray for us. / Refuge of sinners, pray for us. / Queen of Angels, pray for us. / Queen of Martyrs, pray for us.”
35 Eliot complained to Thayer that it had taken him a year to write the poem, and further that he (Thayer) had paid George Moore £100 for a short story, while offering Eliot only $150 for The Waste Land (Letters 515–16).
36 According to a letter to Harriet Monroe of 28 October 1922, Stevens was in the late stages of putting Harmonium together at that date. He registers a lack of confidence in their merit, but there is no hint in the letter (also cited in the previous chapter) that he is revising any of them: “All my earlier things seem like horrid cocoons from which later abortive insects have sprung. The book will amount to nothing, except that it may teach me something ... Only the reading of these outmoded and debilitated poems does make me wish rather desperately to keep on dabbling and to be as obscure as possible until I have perfected an authentic and fluent speech for myself” (Letters 231). Stevens’ first mention of The Waste Land that I have found is a full month later, in a letter to Alice Henderson of November 27, 1922 (Kermode, CP & Prose 940) also cited above, in which he declares: “If it is the supreme cry of despair it is Eliot’s and not his generation’s. Personally, I think it is a bore.” Curiously the TSS of the Ur “Comedian” submitted for the Blindman Prize suffered a fate very similar to that of The Waste Land TSS. It was left at a house in West Hartford where Stevens lived “for some time.” According to the account of her grandson, Reverend John Curry Gay, the landlady occasionally retrieved pages from the Steven’s trash, amongst those pages were nineteen, headed “Submitted for the Blindman Prize,” with the title, “From the Journal of Crispin.” In 1974 the Reverend Curry gave those papers to the Beinecke Library (Martz 4). In contrast to The Waste Land, the published poem is much longer than the one submitted for the prize.
37 The Tetragrammaton is not truly a cipher, since classical Hebrew does not have symbols for vowels, and all words are written without indication of the necessary vowels. The consequence of this lack is a radical ambiguity in Hebrew script that is famously exploited by Kabbalists. The Greeks added the vowels to the Semitic script.
38 It is not, I think, entirely mischievous to contrast these lines describing Crispin’s emancipation from the illusions of the Romantic, represented as his own shadow, to Eliot’s lines from Part I of The Waste Land:
Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. (ll. 24–30)
The darkness and portentousness of Eliot’s lines contrast starkly with the playful brightness of Stevens’ poem.
39 It would be unfair to include Stevens in this generalization, but he does expunge the single mention of Canada from the poem. The draft version of “Journal of Crispin” read as follows: Crispin “Projected a colony that should extend / From the big-rimmed snow-star over Canada / To the dusk of a whistling south below the south.” Oddly, Stevens situates Crispin in Mexico, the country of the marimba, but for the most part “The Comedian as the Letter C” is about that portion of the New World that now comprises the United States of America – minus Hawaii and Alaska, which were not yet states.
40 Stevens’ use of “emprise” here instead of the more colloquial “enterprise” is a characteristic lexical tic. The most recent use in that sense caught by the OED is Browning’s “Dare first / The chief emprise,” in his 1871 Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau: Saviour of Society. The obsolete meaning, “preoccupation, absorption of thought,” whose last recorded use is 1500, fits Stevens’ line better than the current “enterprise’ and is perhaps his intended meaning.
41 My reading of these lines is pretty well the contrary of Hi Simons’ interpretation: “This succession of antitheses between the high things Crispin had projected and the small end to which they came to express the poet’s sense of his character’s failure” (Hi Simons, “The Comedian as the Letter C”: Its Sense and its Significance” 108). My sense is that the “high things” belong to the illusory world Crispin has abandoned in favour of a “real” world.
42 Even if Stevens was, indeed, baptized a Catholic while in hospital, as Father Arthur Hanley claims, there is nothing to mark a point any earlier in his life at which he converted, so we cannot read his poetry in terms of such a change in his belief as we can – and must – with Eliot.
1 Montgomery Belgion is infamous as the author of the review of The Yellow Spot, which Anthony Julius erroneously attributed to Eliot in T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 167–70. Jason Harding points out that “it might have been evident to anyone who consulted the index to volume 15 of the Criterion that Belgion had been the author – batch reviews were conventionally signed with initials at the bottom of the last entry, in this case “M.B.” And Harding adds that Belgion’s animus toward Jews “cannot be so easily displaced on to Eliot, still less to a journal as heterogeneous and multivocal as the Criterion” (158).
2 In “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual,” Jain concludes that Eliot adopted a Derrida-like cognitive scepticism in a 1913 seminar paper for Royce, rejecting the cognitive optimism of the pragmatists: “For Pearse and Royce, through the infinite series of interpretations, error is progressively eliminated and a community approaches nearer the truth. For Eliot, interpretation is relative and leads to an endless regress” (147). However, four pages later, Jain contradicts the latter sentence, claiming that “whereas Derrida affirms the endless regress and play of interpretation, Eliot, with his acute sense of the element of error in all interpretation, does not” (151). I endorse Jain’s second position, but not his first.
3 Rafey Habib would not agree. In The Early T.S. Eliot and Western Philosophy he argues: “Eliot’s deployment of irony was derived from certain thinkers in what has been termed a ‘heterological’ tradition of thought, which has emphatically opposed the liberal-bourgeois world-views descended from the mainstream Enlightenment. This line of thinkers includes Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, Bradley and the other neo-Hegelian idealists of the late nineteenth century such as Royce and Bosanquet (and, more recently, Foucault and Derrida, whose thought was in some respects anticipated by Eliot)” (5). Habib’s “tradition” is sometimes called the “continental” tradition in philosophy, distinct from the philosophical mainstream, sometimes designated “British empiricism.” Habib follows Richard Rorty’s view that this “heterological” tradition is characterized by irony – a feature noted in Eliot’s early poetry from the earliest reviews. But Habib’s list is a very mixed bag, and a more circumstantial examination of Eliot’s relationship (or lack of it) to those figures does not support Habib’s contention. Certainly Eliot’s Harvard was dominated by neo-Hegelians, as Eliot himself has remarked, but to call Foucault and Derrida neo-Hegelians in the same sense as Josiah Royce was a Hegelian is a stretch.
4 Husserl is generally considered to be the modern founder of phenomenology as a philosophical posture – though it can, of course, be traced to Hegel. His student, Heidegger, accepted the label, but Heidegger’s French followers – most notably Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – called themselves existentialists. As the vogue of existentialism faded in the Anglo-American academy, the term “existential” dropped out, and “phenomenology” has taken its place, although with the ambiguity that it may refer to the quite different thought of either Husserl or Heidegger. Paul Ricoeur, for example, is more a Husserlean than a Heideggerean, whereas the contrary is true for Hans-Georg Gadamer – but both travel as phenomenologists.
5 See his “Letter on Humanism” addressed to the French anti-Semite Jean Beaufret, published in 1947 (Basic Writings 193–242).
6 More cites the Harvard Humanist Irving Babbitt to the effect that there is “an element of truth in the assertion of Plato that things human cannot be properly known without a previous insight into divine things” and adds that Babbitt ranges himself “unhesitatingly on the side of the suernaturalists.” But he complains that such views do not “seem to me to meet the clear conviction held by Sophocles or by any other of the great humanists of ancient Greece” (More, “A Revival of Humanism” 9).
7 Stevens’ view is largely compatible with that of Hans Vaihinger, whose The Philosophy of “As if”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind (1911) appeared in an English translation by C.K. Ogden in 1924. However, despite Frank Doggett’s articulation of affinities between Vaihinger and Stevens in Stevens’ Poetry of Thought, there is no evidence at all that Stevens ever read Vaihinger – as Milton Bates pointed out in Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (201–2).
What is clear is that Vaihinger’s views are entirely compatible with American pragmatism, despite his protestations to the contrary. Vaihinger’s careful discrimination of his own position from scepticism, is perhaps of interest in this discussion of Stevens’ views:
Scepticism implies a theory which raises doubts or questioning to the dignity of a principle. The Philosophy of “As if,” however, has never had a trace of this attitude ... Fictions are to be distinguished from Hypotheses. The latter are assumptions which can be proved by further experience. They are therefore verifiable. Fictions are never verifiable, for they are hypotheses which are known to be false, but which are employed because of their utility. When a series of hypotheses in mathematics, mechanics, physics, chemistry, ethics or the philosophy of religion are shown in this way to be useful fictions and so justify themselves, surely this does not imply scepticism. The reality of these hypotheses is not doubted; it is denied on the basis of the positive facts of experience. The expression “Relativism” would be more applicable to the Philosophy of “As if” in so far as it denies all absolute points (in mathematics just as in metaphysics) and shows a natural affinity with the theory of relativity both of the past and the present. (xlii)
For Vaihinger, then, fictions can only be heuristic or “useful” – in the sense that they offer comfort. Hence his view is on the whole compatible with Stevens’ – though neither man knew anything of the other’s work.
8 He is clear on this point in The Necessary Angel: “The interest in the subconscious and in surrealism shows the tendency toward the imaginative. Boileau’s remark that Descartes had cut poetry’s throat is a remark that could have been made respecting a great many people during the last hundred years, and of no one more aptly than of Freud, who, as it happens, was familiar with it and repeats it in his Future of an Illusion [trans. 1929]. The object of that essay was to suggest a surrender to reality” (Kermode 653).
9 In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, an articulation for an English-speaking audience of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, Rorty construes the fundamental point of philosophical hermeneutics in the following way: “It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions” (12). He takes the argument a little further in Contingency, irony and solidarity: “A sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species” (20). And again: “Truths are the skeletons which remain after the capacity to arouse the senses – to cause tingles – has been rubbed off by familiarity and long usage” (152). Oddly, Rorty never cites Stevens in support of his position.
On the basis of these views, Rorty concludes that dialectics ought to be understood as literary criticism. His point is that, like the Stevensian poet, the literary critic deals with discourse that he does not believe, that is to say, with fictional discourse. Such an activity can be carried on only by someone Rorty calls an “ironist” (79–80). In this, Rorty is a latter-day philosophical hermeneut, whose central point is that all discourse requires interpretation, and hence the interpretive disciplines must be considered the master disciplines. His source, Gadamer, is explicit about his own membership in the school of philosophical hermeneutics.
10 The Trinity, of course, is the three persons of God (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) conceived as one and indivisible despite its apparent division. This doctrine was strongly asserted at the Council of Nicaea convened by the Emperor Constantine in 325 in order to put an end the view of Arius that there was just one, indivisible God. Transubstantiation is the doctrine that the bread and wine consecrated at the Mass are truly and veritably transformed into the body and blood of Christ, despite appearances to the contrary.
My presumption is that Stevens regards these “mysteries” as evidence of the Catholic Church’s tolerance of the irrational – a tolerance motivated by a distrust in the sovereign power of human reason, which Stevens shares.
11 Hugo Ott reports on Beaufret’s ideological posture in the preface to Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (8):
One of the most important communicators of Heidegger’s thought to French audiences was the late Jean Beaufret of Lyons, who died in 1982, and to whom Heidegger addressed his “Letter on Humanism” of 1946/47. Beaufret is now [1988] in bad odour – and consequently extremely suspect as a correspondent and associate of Heidegger’s – following the publication of some letters written by him to the historian Robert Faurisson (University of Lyons II), the unspeakable champion of the “Auschwitz lie” thesis. These letters, written in 1978, were published by Faurisson in the journal Annales d’Histoire Révisionniste (No. 3, 1987). They express support for the work that Faurisson is doing, and encourage him to persevere with the same line of research.
Ott notes that in a later issue, Faurisson celebrates Heidegger and Beaufret as his predecessors in revisionism, but finds Faurisson’s “appropriation of Heidegger as a pioneer of the ‘Auschwitz lie’ theses to be ‘without justification.’” Nonetheless he believes that “the Beaufret letters do cast a very dubious light on the whole milieu in which the reception of Heidegger in France has thrived” (9).
12 See “Descartes: Cogito Sum; ‘I’ as a Special Subject,” § 7 of “Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics,” in Basic Writings 273–82. See also Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” Writing and Difference 31–63. Derrida’s essay is an attack on Foucault, to which Foucault replies in “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” trans. Geoff Bennington, Oxford Literary Review 4 (Autumn 1979) 7–28.
13 Marjorie Buhr mentions (10) the letter to Lee, and takes it as evidence that Stevens had a strong interest in Heidegger, which justifies her exploration of parallels in their thought.
14 “Heidegger dit qu’on s’égare d’autant plus loin de la nature et de la substance de la poésie qu’on cherche à la définir comme une réalité commune à des poète différents, car on se condamne ainsi à n’atteindre que l’indifférent de la poésie. Le critique n’atteint dans le poète, le poète n’atteint en lui-même l’essence de la poésie qu’autant qu’ils savent s’avancer dans un domaine où l’essentiel ne coïncide pas avec le plus général, mais avec le plus intérieure.”
For a discussion of Heidegger’s relation to other contemporary thinkers see Richard Wolin.
15 Although Husserl (1859–1938) was a generation older than Stevens, and still more senior to Eliot, he was still publishing in the 1920s. Stevens was aware of at least one aspect of Husserl’s thought – in contrast to his complete ignorance of Heidegger. In “A Collect of Philosophy” (1951) he cites a letter from Jean Wahl on Husserl’s Méditations Cartésiennes, where Husserl mentions the “inexhaustible infinity of a priori” in our minds. Stevens seizes on this idea: “this enormous a priori is potentially as poetic a concept as the idea of the infinity of the world.” In the same letter Wahl cites the Gnostic definition of God, attributing it to Pascal: “La sphère dont le centre est partout et la circonférence n’est nulle part,” (the sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere). Stevens sees it as “a concept belonging to our category”– that is to the category of poetic ideas. He adds several others: Vico’s ricorso, Nietzsche’s eternal return (Ewiges Wiederkehr), Lequier’s idea of freedom, and Malebranche’s “vérités éternelles” (eternal truths). Stevens reveals that Wahl had also mentioned “in an earlier letter” Novalis, Fichte, Hölderlin, the young Hegel, Shelley “influenced by Plato,” Blake, Mallarmé “influenced by the Kabbala and Hegel.” But he dismisses all of these poets, protesting, “I was not interested in the philosophy of poets but in the poetry of philosophers” (Kermode 860).
16 In a reply (19 April1943) to Stevens’ request for help in the letter of 16 April, Henry Church includes a headnote in German: “Warum dürfte die Welt, die uns etwas angeht, – nicht eine Fiktion sein? Und wer da Fragt: “aber zur Fiktion gehört ein Urheber?” dürfte dem nicht rund geantwortetwerden: warum? Gehört dieses “Gehört” vielleicht mit zur Fiktion? Jenseits von Gut und Böse.” Aphorism 34. (Huntington WAS 3415).
Leggett gives this translation (37): “Why might not the world which concerns us – be a fiction? And to any who suggested: ‘But to a fiction belongs an originator?’ – might it not be bluntly replied: Why? May not this ‘belong’ also belong to the fiction?”
17 See I.A. Richards’ The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924).
18 Frank Lentricchia’s neo-Marxist assault on Stevens categorically rejects the sincerity of his literary project: “His later poetry is a masochistic form of gourmandizing, deliberately teased out and emptied of satisfaction, a sustaining of overwhelming appetite. At the poetic, if not at the economic, level of existence, he found a way to supply the spirit by resisting consumption: a life of indulgence, a poetics of asceticism tempted” (Lentricchia 62). The animus of this characterization is palpable, and distressingly ad hominem.
19 Note to p. 105: “Cf. ‘La mentalité des sociétés inférieures ... comporte bien des représentations abstraites, et des représentations générales; mais ni cette abstraction, ni cette généralité ne sont celles de nos concepts.’ Lévy-Bruhl, Les Fonctions Mentales, p. 137.” [The mentality of inferior societies certainly includes abstract representations, and general representations; but neither this abstraction nor this generality is that of our concepts.”]
Jain points out that Eliot read Lévy-Bruhl for the seminar he took with Josiah Royce: “The works of such philosophers as James, Bergson, and Bradley, and of social scientists such as Lévy Bruhl, represented for Eliot an important nexus of ideas, particularly in their implications for mysticism and irrationalism – which he felt compelled to reject, but which nonetheless gave him a sharpened and poignant awareness of the workings of the human mind” (11). While Eliot ultimately rejected Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of participation Jain notes that he was initially attracted to it and endorsed it in his third seminar paper for Royce (142).
Also, in a note in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Eliot alludes to Lévy-Bruhl’s theory approvingly as a counter to I.A. Richards’ bifurcation of language into scientific and emotive modes (248 n1): “In chapter xxii of Principles of Literary Criticism Mr. Richards discusses these matters in his own way. As evidence that there are other approaches as well, see a very interesting article Le symbolisme et l’âme primitive by E. Cailliet and J.A. Bédé in the Revue de littérature comparée for April–June 1932. The authors, who have done field-work in Madagascar, apply the theories of Lévy-Bruhl: the pre-logical mentality persists in civilised man, but becomes available only to or through the poet.” For an extended discussion of Eliot’s engagement with Lévy-Bruhl and other anthropologists see Piers Gray, especially chapter 4 pp. 108–42, where he prints excerpts from Eliot’s graduate paper for Royce of January 1914, and offers a general commentary. Lévy-Bruhl is given considerable and respectful consideration in that untitled essay. Eliot later referred to it by the title, “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual.”
20 Compare Wm. James, Pragmatism 87: “The pragmatistic [sic] view [is] that all our theories are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world enigma. And Bergson Creative Evolution, 244: “In a general way, reality is ordered exactly to the degree in which it satisfies our thought. Order is therefore a certain agreement between subject and object. It is the mind finding itself again in things.” Clearly Bergson’s cast of mind tends toward some sort of participation, while James – despite his willingness elsewhere to entertain mystical knowledge – explicitly rejects the notion that the mind communicates with reality.
21 Oddly enough, mainstream Marxist/Communist thought holds a similar view. Of course, the world that determines human thoughts and beliefs in Marxist thought is the human world of the means of production, the “base” on which the “superstructure” or “false consciousness” is built. The classic expression is in Marx’s The German Ideology: “The phantoms formed in the human brain are ... necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”
22 For example, in “Relations Between Poetry and Painting” (1951) Stevens wrote: “If it [the imagination] merely reconstructed the experience or repeated for us our sensations in the face of it, it would be the memory. What it really does is to use it as material with which it does whatever it wills. This is the typical function of the imagination which always makes use of the familiar to produce the unfamiliar” (Kermode 744). Coleridge would have had no difficulty in agreeing with Stevens’ remark.
In a recent article (“God, Imagination, and the Interior Paramour,”) B.J. Leggett offers a persuasive new reading of the fragment “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” which involves a reinterpretation of Stevens’ view of imagination. Basically he argues that the poem is a celebration not of the human imagination, as almost all readers have supposed, but rather of the poet’s participation in a divine imagination. I am inclined to agree. However, so described, Stevens’ view of imagination is not so different from Coleridge’s. Here is Coleridge’s definition from Biographia Litteraria: “The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act or creation in the infinite I am. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all its objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.” Stevens’ imagination is more like Coleridge’s primary imagination than his secondary, poetic imagination.
23 It might form a parlour game to attempt to determine which Saint John Stevens has in mind. St John the Divine, author of the Book of the Apocalypse, seems an unlikely candidate, but I cannot think of any compelling reason to choose between St John the Baptist or the mystic St John of the Cross. There are a dozen or more St Johns in the canon to choose from.
24 “Man and Bottle,” published together with “Of Modern Poetry” in Hika 6 (May 1940) leaves no doubt that, despite American neutrality, the war was on Stevens’ mind at this time.
25 Donald Childs sees the conflict between pragmatism and mysticism as the key to understanding Eliot’s conflicted psyche. Here is his conclusion:
Despite the disagreement between the Christian Eliot and the pragmatic Eliot – the former convinced that there is an objective Truth, the latter suspecting that there is only subjective truth – the agreement of Eliot the word-bound mystic and Eliot the world-bound pragmatist that the expression of an objective truth is not possible in language ironically leads to the same conclusion: we must construct something upon which to rejoice. In the end, by following Eliot’s opposition of Bergson and James through both the dissertation’s and Four Quartets’ opposition of subject-side and object-side points of view, and by following the opposition in Four Quartets of mystical and pragmatic moments, we can see that Four Quartets does not locate in what are traditionally identified as its mystical moments the “complete simplicity” of an experience of reality-as-essence ... The mystical experience of certainty – within which Eliot was once concerned to discern a hierarchy in terms of a distinction between classical and romantic mysticisms – thus comes to be seen as but one part of human experience, a part of experience always to be supplemented by scepticism (itself a high and difficult faith), for even classical mystics, the most responsible of religious adventurers, are romantics at heart – if they are human, and especially if they are sons and lovers. (Childs 1999 224–5)
I cannot agree with Childs’ characterization of the pragmatist’s truth as a “subjective truth.” There is nothing subjective about the pragmatic test of hypotheses. If they do not stand up to empirical verification, they are discarded. Pragmatism’s insistence that incorrigible truth is unattainable does not justify labelling it “subjectivist,” as Childs does.
26 In short, Eliot rejects what Richard Rorty calls the “specular metaphor” in which the mind is regarded as a mirror of nature (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature). Rorty presents a pragmatist and phenomenologically inflected view of European philosophy – especially of Heidegger – that the Eliot of the dissertation would have found reasonably compatible. Rorty summarizes his thesis as follows: “The notion of knowledge as the assemblage of accurate representations is optional – that is it may be replaced by a pragmatist conception of knowledge which eliminates the Greek contrast between contemplation and action, between representing the world and coping with it. A historical epoch dominated by Greek ocular metaphors may, I suggest, yields to one in which the philosophical vocabulary incorporating these metaphors seems as quaint as the animistic vocabulary of pre-classical times” (11).
27 In addition to appearing in “Morning at the Window,” the epithet occurs – with a more clearly lubricious meaning – in “Portrait of a Lady,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “Conversation Galante,” and “Ash-Wednesday.” Interestingly, “twisted” does not reappear after “Ash-Wednesday.”
28 See Donoghue (“Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot”) 192–6. His view that Stevens’ notion of “major man” in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” is “good enough to cut a dash in the poem but, outside the poem good for nothing but mystification,” pretty well sums up his dismissal of Stevens as a thinker. Of course, I do not claim that Stevens has resolved the thorny epistemological, ontological, and theological issues that confront mankind. I only claim that he has confronted them with intelligence, sincerity, and passion.
1 Between Latimer’s letter of 1933 and the publication of Ideas of Order, Stevens published another twelve poems, all of which were collected in Ideas of Order.
2 Most commentators have either accepted Stevens’ denial and not speculated on the relevance of Fernandez’s opinions to the poem, or doubted his denial, but then ignored the possible relevance of Fernandez’s speculations. Other exceptions are Harold Bloom and Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos.
Bloom accommodates Fernandez to his general thesis that Stevens’ poetry can be understood, root and branch, as a dialogue with his romantic predecessors: “Ramon Fernandez is, of course, no Dorothy [Wordsworth], and in spite of some grumpy protestations in Stevens’ letters, he was a modern French critic whom Stevens certainly had read. As a formalist, Fernandez had much in common with Stevens ... and Fernandez was anti-Romantic, being in this a gallic equivalent of Eliot or Tate” (96). Like Riddell, Bloom is uninterested in Fernandez’s Humanism or his right wing political affiliations.
De Sousa Santos is not interested in the historical person, but sees him as merely a convenient mask for an insensitive interlocutor. She concludes in “The Woman in the Poem”: “Ramon Fernandez is cunningly made to act the dumb part of a dull, uninteresting, un-responsive witness to the poet’s dread wonder at his own imagining of the woman as the mysterious originating power, infinitely desirable, but definitely alien – and totally out of reach” (150).
No one has explored Eliot’s relation with Fernandez – although Longenbach does mention that Eliot published Fernandez in the Criterion and also that he translated him.
3 He gives three reasons why he is not a Communist. The only one relevant to this discussion is the second. As a Humanist, he says he cannot accept Communist class warfare: “La seconde raison, c’est que l’idée d’une adhésion au communisme comporte à mes yeux une action de tous les instants, un dévouement total à la cause ... Quand on défend comme moi un certain humanisme, fondé sur la croyance que l’homme est pour l’homme la plus haute valeur, et que l’humanité ne sera point égale à elle-même tant que tous les hommes ne seront pas humains, on ne saurait laisser triompher les gens qui pensent exactement le contraire sans encourir de déshonneur philosophique qui est peut-être le plus amer de tous les déshonneurs” (704–5).
4 Measures was translated by Eliot’s friend Montgomery Belgion, who has himself been accused of Nazi sympathies.
5 Here is Fernandez’s response:
“Ne voit-il donc pas qu’en tâchant de donner son sens humain et dramatique à l’oeuvre d’un poète on veut restituer à cette oeuvre sa richesse et sa profondeur? Ne voit-il donc pas que si la poésie est une libération spirituelle ce n’est pas en rompant ses attaches à la vie qu’on le prouvera, mais au contraire en montrant qu’elle intègre la vie en la surmontant? (“Poésie et Biographie” 825–6) [Does he not see that in attempting to render the human and dramatic sense of a poet’s work, one wishes to restore to that work its richness and profundity? Does he not see that poetry is a spiritual liberation that does not breach the connections to life one experiences, but, on the contrary, shows that it integrates life while transcending it.]
“Le drame personnel de M. Valéry, et celui de M. Bremond ont eu précisément pour effet les détourner du dramatique, du psychologique, pour les enfermer dans la poésie ou dans la mystique pure. Son point de vue est un point de vue de rhétorique déguisé en point de vue philosophique. (827) [M. Valery’s personal drama, and that of M. Bremond have had precisely the effect of turning them away from the dramatic, the psychological, [and] enclosing them in poetry or in pure mysticism. His point of view is that of rhetoric disguised as philosophy.]
6 “Dans toutes les sciences de l’homme aujourd’hui, de la sociologie à la médecine, la considération de l’histoire concrète individuelle du sujet étudié prend une place de plus en plus importante, ce qui veut dire que toute connaissance humaine tend à devenir biographie” (829).
7 Jason Harding points out in the Criterion that “in 1927 ... both the Criterion and the Adelphi were troubled by commercial exigencies ... A resumption of the controversy between Eliot and Murry, therefore, gave a timely boost to both journals. The classicism and romanticism debate attracted a great deal of attention in the London literary world. Beyond that charmed circle, however, it is unlikely that it attracted many new subscribers to either periodical.”
The Romantic-Classic controversy included: Murry, “Towards a Synthesis,” Criterion 5 (June 1927) 294–313; Eliot, Review of Ludovici, Chesterton, and Belloc, Criterion 6 (July 1927) 69–71; Rev. D’Arcy, “The Thomistic Synthesis and Intelligence,” Criterion 6. 3 (Sept. 1927) 210–28; Eliot, “Mr. Middleton Murry’s Synthesis” Criterion 6, 4 (Oct. 1927) 340–7; Charles Mauron, “Concerning Intuition” Criterion 6, 3 (Sept. 1927) 220–35. Trans. T.S. Eliot; Ramon Fernandez, “A Note on Intelligence and Intuition” Criterion 6 (Oct. 1927) 332–9. Trans. T.S. Eliot; Murry, “Concerning Intelligence” Criterion 6 (Dec. 1927) 524–33.
That controversy was followed by the controversy of Humanism vs religion. Once again Eliot dragooned Murry, Read, and Fernandez to enter the fray, as well as Norman Foerster, G.K. Chesterton, and Philip Richards. Eliot published his own contribution, “Second Thoughts about Humanism” in Murry’s Adelphi (Harding 37–9). The two controversies tended to overlap one another since the notion of intuition – central to Murry’s romanticism – also underpinned his rather spiritual Humanism.
8 Fernandez refers to this article on “his friend T.S. Eliot” in “Poésie et Biographie.” That reference was perhaps one more reason for Stevens to put a black mark beside Fernandez’s name.
9 “Les objections que soulève l’oeuvre de Proust, considéré comme analyse intégrale du coeur, comme révélatrice du fond de notre nature, peuvent être à mon avis réduites à deux essentielles; elle n’édifie point une hiérarchie des valeurs, et elle ne manifeste de son début à sa conclusion, aucun progrès spirituel” (Messages 147–8).
10 “Le processus décrit par Newman et Meredith s’accomplit chez Proust dans un ordre inverse: garder une impression, pour eux, c’est transposer dans le ton de l’esprit une expérience concrète particulière, couper les amarres spatiale et temporelles de cette expérience, lui conférer la plasticité infinie d’une personnalité vivante en croissance perpétuelle” (159).
Fernandez contrasts this approved mode to Proust’s disapproved mode:
Pour Proust, c’est fondre entièrement son moi dans l’expérience, le déposer aux points du temps et de l’espace [160] où elle a eu lieu, par suite le découper en morceaux dont chacun est identifié avec une expérience particulière et logé dans un coin du temps qui acquiert ainsi une fixité et une extériorité qui sont des caractères propres à l’espace (Messages 159–60.) [For Proust it is to submerge oneself entirely in the experience, to locate it in particular spots in time and space where it took place, and then to slice it up into pieces, each identified with a particular experience and lodged in a temporal corner, which thus acquires a permanence and exteriority which are properly the properties of space.] (Messages 159–60. My translation. Fernandez’s emphasis.)
11 It is a bit of a digression, but since Wordsworth’s employment of “spots of time” anticipates Proust’s practice, Eliot no doubt would have regarded Proust’s practice as romantic and therefore to be avoided.
Curiously, Eliot himself relies on such moments – though he takes great care to “sever the spatial and temporal moorings of the experience.” He famously admits such a practice in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism where Eliot asks: “Why, for all of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depth of feeling into which we cannot peer” (181–2).
12 Of course, Cardinal Newman was a Christian, and did not base his morality exclusively on human values. Eliot draws attention to this “problem,” but justifies Fernandez’s liberty on the grounds that Newman was one – like himself? – who “tried to believe”: “M. Fernandez is, from a certain point of view, in closer sympathy with Newman than are many of Newman’s Christian or literary apologists; he is in much closer sympathy with Newman in his place and time: with Newman, in fact – and it is a large part – in so far as Newman was not Christian or Catholic. He does not understand, perhaps, that in which Newman believed or tried to believe, but he understands, better than almost anyone, the way in which Newman believed or tried to believe it. And this is a capital difference: a different way of facing the ‘moral’ problem” (753).
13 I have paraphrased Fernandez’s remarks, which are as follows: “Mais si je consulte les hommes, et principalement ceux qui n’exercent pas le métier d’écrire et de penser, je découvre en eux une totale indifférence à la suprématie du spirituel. Le cercle se referme: je ne vois pas comment on en pourrait sortir autrement que par la foi. Reste à se demander ce que c’est que l’esprit. Chacun en parle avec certitude mais serait bien en peine de le définir. Avant de propager une révolution spirituelle, il conviendrait pourtant de savoir pour quoi on va se battre. Quand il intitulait son intéressant essai, Le Monde sans Ame, M. Daniel Rops impliquait dans le titre que l’âme avait fui le monde et qu’il fallait qu’elle lui revînt. Mais si le monde n’avait jamais eu d’âme?” (114).
14 Eliot was quite familiar with Leibniz’s thought, having published two articles on it – “The Development of Leibniz’ Monadism,” Monist 26 (Oct. 1916) 534–6 and “Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centers,” Monist 27 (1915–16) 566–76 – both reprinted in Knowledge and Experience.
In the first article he compares Leibniz’s monadic epistemology favourably to Aristotle’s dualism, though he concedes difficulties for the possibility of science: “It is evident that with the possibility of changes of ‘points of view’ the meaning of prediction becomes hopelessly attenuated. Every moment will see a new universe. At every moment there will be a new series of series; but continuity makes necessary a point of view from which there shall be a permanent series of series of series.” Nonetheless: “Leibniz’ theory of mind and matter, of body and soul, is in some ways the subtlest that has ever been devised. Matter is an arrested moment of mind, ‘mind without memory.’ [Note: “Compare the Bergsonian theory of matter as consciousness ‘running down.’”] By state is not meant feeling, but the monad at any instant of time. In many ways it is superior to that of Aristotle.”
That Eliot was still in his Humanist phase in 1916 is evident from the following complaint of Leibniz’s “superstition”: “When he [Leibniz] turns to preformation, to the vinculum substantiale, to the immortality of the soul, we feel a certain repulsion; for with all the curious fables of the Timaeus or the Physics and Aristotle’s history of animals, we know that Aristotle and Plato were somehow more secure, better balanced, and less superstitious than the man who was in power of intellect their equal” (Knowledge and Experience 196).
The second article explores similarities between Bradley’s idealism and Leibniz’s monadism – as well as Russell’s logic. In this article he cites the Bradley passage also cited in notes to The Waste Land.
Stevens also comments on Leibniz, but much later in his life – in “A Collect of Philosophy,” the Moody Lecture he delivered at the University of Chicago on 16 November 1951. There he describes Leibniz’s monadic theory as holding that “reality consists of a mass of monads, like bees clinging to a branch, although for him the branch was merely a different set of monads.” He notes that “Bertrand Russell said that Leibniz’ monads were gods,” dismissing (or praising?) Leibniz as a “poet manqué.” And he notes that “in a system of monads, we come, in the end, to a man who is not only a man but sea and mountain, too, and to a God who is not only all these: man and sea and mountain but a God as well” (Kermode 852–3). While Stevens does not indicate any approval of this consequence of Leibniz’s thought, it does seem to conform to Stevens’ own views – especially as expressed in the contemporaneous work, “The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain.”
15 cf Bruce Kuklick, xx–xxi (My emphasis):
The epistemological problems bequeathed by Kant to succeeding generations of philosophers were central for all of these men [Harvard philosophers], even to classic Unitarians like Bowen. The intellectual optimism of the eighteenth century produced a religious philosophy with its basis in British empiricism: the observed universe was benign and evidenced the deity. But Darwin called forth intellectual pessimism, so that after the Civil War religion was defended on a priori, Kantian grounds. Philosophers employed these same grounds to reinterpret the foundations of science as biological advances raised issues that traditional empiricism could not explain. Consequently, Cambridge thought and Harvard Pragmatism, like all forms of pragmatism, had an idealistic character. The truth of a belief was a function of its practical significance. That is, its truth was not independent of the individuals who held it but was relative to the action issuing from it; the objects of which beliefs were true had a relation to individuals and to consciousness.”
16 However, they did not follow – unless we accept B.J. Leggett’s persuasive argument in “God, Imagination, and the Interior Paramour” that we read The Rock as such a continuation.
17 These terms are sufficiently rare to justify a gloss. “Thuriferous” is “that which brings forth incense,” and a “ju-ju” is “an object of any kind superstitiously venerated by West African native peoples, and used as a charm, amulet, or means of protection; a fetish.” Eliot later had more tolerance for incense, though not for fetishes.
He also invoked “ju-ju” in a 1926 review of J.M. Robertson’s hostile study of Shaw, “Mr. Shaw and ‘The Maid.’” There it is employed in a dismissive characterization of Bergson’s élan vital (“life force”):
The more intelligent among those persons who have lost interest in anything that Mr. Shaw says, ought to be glad of some proof that their feelings are justified ... For what issues most clearly from a reading of Mr. Robertson’s book is Mr. Shaw’s utter inability to devote himself wholeheartedly to any cause. To Mr. Shaw, truth and falsehood (we speak without prejudice) do not seem to have the same meaning as to ordinary people. Hence the danger, with his ‘St. Joan,’ of his deluding the numberless crowd of sentimentally religious people who are incapable of following any argument to a conclusion. Such people will be misled until they can be made to understand that the potent ju-ju Life Force is a gross superstition; and that (in particular) Mr. Shaw’s ‘St. Joan’ is one of the most superstitious of the effigies which have been erected to that remarkable woman. (Criterion 4 April 1926 390).
18 At the risk of pedantic overkill, I must point out that our perceptions are already inferences from the sensory stimuli which prompt them. That is to say, we do not see and hear the ocean, but discrete visual and auditory stimuli, from which we construct a perception that we call “the ocean.” By so labelling the perception, we are already modulating it into a concept that has – or is capable of having – a place in a cognitive structure.
For an intriguing discussion of the exploration of this issue in Stevens’ poetry, see Sellin, Valéry, Stevens, and the Cartesian Dilemma.
19 Here is the full passage in French: “Dans une récente étude j’ai défini le sentiment: ‘une possibilité perpétuelle de copies conformes par l’action d’une certain prétention, possibilité garantie par l’intuition d’une résistance intérieure.’ Si cette définition est exacte on aperçoit la valeur toute secondaire des témoignages sensibles: les deux éléments essentiels du sentiment sont la résistance intérieure et la prétention ou intention de l’esprit” (Messages 163. My translation. Original emphasis).
20 “Les réactions mystiques ne signifient guère plus à mes yeux que les réactions sensibles tant que je ne suis pas convaincu du pouvoir de l’homme de créer, avec ses impressions, des sentiments. Car tout le problème est là. On peut se former des sentiments et leur obéir sans le secours mystique – pourvu qu’on n’appelle pas mystique tout ce qui est sentimental – et l’on peut plaquer du mysticisme sur une incurable sensualité” (Messages 163).
21 Comte portrayed human culture and civilization as progressing through three principal stages, each being abandoned successively as erroneous. They are: the theological or fictitious, the metaphysical or abstract, and the scientific or positive. The last, of course, is not erroneous, and gives us the term “positivism.”
22 Here I believe Eliot is referring to his own flirtation with Humanism.
23 In a rather ill-tempered article, “Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and the Space between them,” Denis Donoghue accepts the standard view that Stevens was a humanist foe of religion, and adds the canard that he was a rather brainless foe. He ignores Stevens’ protestations against the label and insultingly caricatures his “philosophical position” as follows: “According to Stevens’ parable, Adam and Eve were the first humanists, because – like Descartes – they conceived the world in their own terms and practiced the attribute of reason in doing so. They had a second earth by construing the first in terms most favorable to themselves. They founded the enlightenment” (Shea and Huff 311).
24 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 37. Church quoted the citation untranslated (WAS 3415). See note 16, this chapter.
25 Bates agrees that the supposed Nietzschean character of Stevens’ posture on belief and fiction cannot be supported (247–65). Apparently he had not seen the exchange with Church, for he does not refer to it.
Doggett cites the passage from Nietzsche as found in Vaihinger (353), but he too is unaware of the exchange with Church. His assessment of Stevens’ philosophical musing is rather dismissive: “As is often mentioned, Stevens uses the poetic ideas of philosophers, but almost always he uses the kind that cannot be identified with a particular system of conjecture or belief; in fact, most of these ideas are so slight, so incipient, that some version of them may be found in almost any general philosophic work of the last two centuries” (108–9).
While I agree with Doggett’s last remark, I do not agree that the ubiquity of an idea is a guarantee of its triviality. Nor do I endorse his requirement that for an idea to be taken seriously it must have a “church,” what he calls “a particular system of conjecture or belief.”
26 Charismatic religious believers, of course, do think that they have incorrigible knowledge of religious truth. But that is certainly not true of all believers, and is not true of Eliot.
Within the Christian tradition, to have faith means to accept as true, that which you do not know to be true in the normal way. The parable of doubting Thomas is the touchstone for the Christian doctrine of faith. John has him expressing doubt: “The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20: 25–8). Eight days later the risen Christ returns: “Then saith he to Thomas, reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing” (John 20: 27). Of course, Thomas is mortified. The incident has a place in the liturgy reminding the faithful that it is more blessed to believe without any direct evidence than to believe with it.
27 Stevens does not seem to have been a keen reader of Bergson – though he does cite him. Nonetheless his position on the relation between reality and imagination is very close to Bergson’s. In Creative Evolution, Bergson provides an account of that exchange entirely commensurate with Stevens: “In a general way, reality is ordered exactly to the degree in which it satisfies our thought. Order is therefore a certain agreement between subject and object. It is the mind finding itself again in things ... In its highest forms, it is more than finality, for of a free action or a work of art we may say that they show a perfect order, and yet they can only be expressed in terms of ideas approximately, and after the event” (244).
The view expressed in the following lines from “The Man with the Blue Guitar” XXVIII seems entirely compatible with Bergsonian thought:
I am a native in this world
And think in it as a native thinks,
Gesu, not native of a mind
Thinking the thoughts I call my own,
Native, a native in the world
And like a native think in it.
28 “Il semble en effet qu’il soit fort dangereux de commencer par l’analyse des manifestations sensibles et affectives du sentiment, lesquelles n’en sont qu’un aspect, et non des plus significatifs; et comme on retrouve ces manifestations dans beaucoup de troubles mentaux, dans presque tous les troubles de la sensibilité et dans ce qu’on peut appeler en générale les crises de défaillance, il s’ensuit qu’elles servent de pièges bien plus souvent que de guides dans l’étude du sentiment. En les écoutant nous n’entendons que la voix mécanique du corps” (Messages 161. My emphasis).
29 This latter is not a sentiment with which Eliot would readily agree, conscious as he is of the theological tradition. However, Stevens’ view does not necessarily entail disrespect for the long tradition of Jewish and Christian theological speculation – of which he knew little. Rather, his point, I think, is that in the twentieth century extant religious beliefs have all been shown to be erroneous. The lack of thought, then, is really a lack of truth.
30 Despite a considerable literature to the contrary, Eliot’s hostility to both Communism and Fascism is not to be doubted. One of the more recent studies is Kenneth Asher’s T.S. Eliot and Ideology. Asher explicitly aligns himself with the earlier assessments of Eliot as a fascist sympathizer that, he says, “begins with John Harrison’s roughly sketched The Reactionaries (1967), reaches a much higher level of sophistication in William Chace’s The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and builds successfully on Chace’s work in Michael North’s The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (10).
Asher’s claim is the following: “Simply put, it seems to me that from beginning to end, Eliot’s work, including both the poetry and the prose, was shaped by a political vision inherited from French reactionary thinkers, especially from Charles Maurras ... The failure of most other scholarship to acknowledge the centrality of Eliot’s political agenda [!] is not surprising since Eliot himself tended to camouflage it (2–3). Although Eliot’s political conservatism cannot be doubted, and the influence of Maurras is undeniable, I find this whole debunking tradition to be excessively concerned with condemning those views by association, rather than assessing them on their own merits. It should be clear from this study that I think Eliot’s political ideas were at best impractical, and at worst offensive to the very Christian values he professes to espouse.
In a 1936 Criterion “Commentary” on H.R.G. Greaves’ Labourite assessment of Reactionary England, Eliot characterized the movement to the right as a consequence of the loss of faith, and of a socio-economic dysfunction in Western democracies during the Depression: “The only reactionaries today are those who object to the dictatorship of finance and the dictatorship of a bureaucracy under whatever political name it is assembled; and those who would have some law and some ideal not purely of this world. But the movement, towards the Right so-called, about which Mr. Greaves is apprehensive, is far more profound than any mere machinations of consciously designing interests could make it. It is a symptom of the desolation of secularism, of that loss of vitality, through the lack of replenishment from spiritual sources, which we have witnessed elsewhere, and which becomes ready for the application of the artificial stimulants of nationalism and class” (15 July 1936 667–8).
Earlier in this “Commentary” Eliot endorsed the decision of England and France to stay out of the Spanish Civil War. The desolation “witnessed elsewhere” is doubtless a reference to that war, which pitted Communism (class) against Fascism and Nazism (nationalism).
31 The fact that these remarks amount to his disowning his mockery of Lemercier’s piety in “Lettres d’un Soldat,” is a measure of far how Stevens had come from his early flirtation with Humanism.
32 By “style” Stevens means something stronger than is usually the case – even stronger than Schopenhauer’s view that style is the man: “Style is not something applied. It is something inherent, something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress. It may be said to be a voice that is inevitable. A man has no choice about his style. When he says I am my style the truth reminds him that it is his style that is himself. If he says, as my poem is, so are my gods and so am I, the truth remains quiet and broods on what he has said” (“Two or Three Ideas” in Opus Posthumous 263).
33 The term “noeud vital” is Bergson’s and designates the knot or cluster within an organism that contains the fundamental vital forces. It is essentially equivalent to the Aristotelian “entelechy,” the mysterious vital force that for Aristotle distinguishes animate from inanimate matter. Vis, of course, is Latin for “force” or “energy.” The belief in entelechy or some such indwelling force in living things persisted as a minor heresy in biology until the discovery of the double helix of DNA, a half century ago.
34 “Et d’où peut venir la prétention de l’esprit sinon d’une entente entre celui-ci et l’impression, de la faculté que nous avons de penser ce sentiment, d’accorder aux lois propres de l’intelligence l’impression que nous laisse une expérience?” (Fernandez’s emphasis).
35 “Le sentiment est donc situé sur un plan de conscience intermédiaire entre l’activité intellectuelle et l’impression sensible. On ne peut dire qu’il soit une vérité, puisqu’il repose sur une intuition ineffable qui ne se peut prouver que par l’action; mais on ne peut dire non plus qu’il soit un état de réceptivité purement passive puisqu’il participe de l’activité de l’esprit et le met en mesure d’accomplir sa fonction la plus éminente, qui est de concevoir avec certitude l’avenir.”
36 “Le sentiment est donc bien plutôt une réponse de tout notre être que l’on peut traduire indifféremment dans le langage de l’intelligence ou dans celui de la sensibilité, mais dont nos actes sont les signes véritables, les seuls qui permettent de mesurer exactement sa valeur.”
37 “Loin de modérer l’audace de l’imagination, il la réchauffe à la chaleur d’une présence ineffable qui l’accompagne dans tous ses détours; rien de matériel ne le garantit, mais il sait se garantir lui-même par ce je ne sais quoi d’éternel qui paraît dans les moindres témoignages; et l’on peut dire que le sentiment vrai, quel qu’il soit, imprime le sceau de la justice sur les actions les plus terribles.”
38 “Mais, je le demande, est-il possible de considérer l’homme dans sa réalité, dans toute sa réalité, sans tenir compte de ses tendances spirituelles, et ne voit-on pas que loin de s’ajouter à lui de l’extérieur, comme un corps étranger qui ne changerait rien à sa constitution, elles développent, éprouvent et modifient les parties les plus cachées de sa nature, que sa moindre aspiration est un signe dont une graphologie assez subtile saurait tirer parti, et qu’enfin nous ne connaissons bien ce qu’il est que lorsque nous connaissons ce qu’il veut être?
1 See Neville Thompson, The Anti-Appeasers. “They [the National Government of Britain] had considerable sympathy and even admiration for the Italian system; less for the German, though they hoped that in time it would mellow and mature along Italian lines; but for the Russian system there was nothing but thinly disguised fear and hatred. Neville Chamberlain, who was so proud of this personal contacts with Hitler and Mussolini, never made any attempt to deal directly with Stalin” (40).
2 When asked by an interviewer if he had read a particular article, he replied: “In Partisan Review? Well, then, I must have read it. I always read it, all of it. An excellent magazine isn’t it? The only exception to the dreary scene.” (Quoted in MacLeod, Wallace Stevens, 92).
3 For a discussion of the literature on Eliot’s alleged mysticism see Donald Childs, T.S. Eliot. Childs argues that Eliot’s “mysticism” is a mark of his proto-deconstructive tendencies, and he provides a Freudian analysis of Eliot’s psyche to account for those tendencies:
Yet just as important as the philosophical aspect of my study is its psycho-biographical aspect. In any attempt to understand Eliot’s mysticism, an appreciation of the poststructural perspective that Eliot achieved through his study of philosophy at Harvard and Oxford takes us only so far. A fuller understanding requires, on the one hand, an appreciation of the self-diagnosed mother-complex that he found himself sharing with D.H. Lawrence and, on the other, an appreciation of the visionary experiences that attended the almost pathological misogyny that developed during his troubled first marriage. As much as the turn-of-the-century anti-metaphysical academic mood, Eliot’s lived experiences led him to appreciate the void that was both the medium and the message of his mystical vision. (xix)
Childs’ anachronistic characterization of Eliot’s Harvard scepticism as “poststructural” is a common practice in current criticism that I have been careful to avoid.
In fact, Eliot’s dissertation is roughly contemporaneous with the publication of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale in 1916 – which is thought to be the fons et erigo of poststructuralism – though well after the delivery of the lectures on which it is based. (Saussure died in 1913.) So far as I know, Eliot had no knowledge of Saussure’s linguistic theories.
It is remarks in the dissertation such as the following that inspire Childs’ attribution of affinity with poststructuralism: “We found that the ideal can never be set over against the real absolutely, but tends to run, either forward or back, into the real which it intends, or the real out of which it may be said to be made; for both these reals are after all nothing but itself [the idea’s self] at another stage of development” (57). But this is Bradleyan idealism, not Saussurean structuralism – still less Derridean or De Manian poststructuralism.
4 In the booklet Dante, Eliot attempts to devise an ad hoc theory of mystic vision that would make it epiphenomenal, like dreaming, without stripping it of its revelatory character: “Dante’s is a visual imagination. It is a visual imagination ... in the sense that he lived in an age in which men still saw visions. It was a psychological habit, the trick of which we have forgotten, but as good as any of our own. We have nothing but dreams, and we have forgotten that seeing visions – a practice now relegated to the aberrant and uneducated – was once a more significant, interesting, and disciplined kind of dreaming. We take it for granted that our dreams spring from below: possibly the quality of our dreams suffers in consequence” (15). An even clearer instance is found in “Religion without Humanism”: “There is much chatter about mysticism; for the modern world the word means some spattering indulgence of emotion, instead of the most terrible concentration and askesis ... Only those have the right to talk of discipline who have looked into the Abyss” (110).
Ted Hughes is less cautious than most on the subject of the mystical tendency in Eliot, claiming that he was even more prone to paranormal inspiration than Yeats, but that he resisted it: “In comparison with Yeats, Eliot too looks not a little shamanic. In nervous temperament, and in the known psychological events of his late adolescence and early manhood, he is an even more extreme and characteristic example of the type than Yeats. But in him, the process of becoming aware of his calling was somehow more problematic. It was more agonized and finally more awesome” (Hughes 24–5). I am sure that Eliot would have been scandalized by Hughes’ view of his “shamanic” character.
5 Albert Gelpi, in A Coherent Splendor, regards both Stevens and Eliot as late Romantics. While I am broadly in agreement with that assessment, Gelpi’s structuring of Stevens’ career seems overly schematic. In addition his characterization of pure poetry is a better fit for surrealism:
The long course of Stevens’ career, therefore, charts his hesitation between an inclination toward poésie pure and an inclination, as in “Sunday Morning,” toward the “poem of the earth.” Both inclinations represented two sides of a dilemma. On the one hand, spiritless naturalism devolves into a dispirited materialism – the malady of the quotidian, the white world of the snow man. On the other hand, poésie pure expresses itself first in the sensuous colors of the imagination – those nightgowns of purple with green rings, those exotic shimmers on the sea surface full of clouds – but its final tendency, as the preceding passage shows, is to merge those colors into the pure whiteness of the “ultimate intellect” – if not Platonic Mind, then at least the abstracted mind of the dreamer lost to the world. Stevens found himself both a materialist manqué and a Platonist manqué (63).
This account blunts the subtlety of Stevens’ engagement with the human incapacity to resolve the contrast between the emotionally charged (or imagined) world with the indifferent world of contingent event and accident. To label our involvement in the immediacy of psychological experience “Platonic,” as Gelpi does, seems to me to be an egregious error. The point of the dilemma is that we have direct experience of our emotions and concepts, but only mediated experience of what Gelpi calls “the quotidian,” that is, the phenomenal world of experience. Of course, the aporia cannot be surmounted since the mediation is performed precisely by our emotions and concepts, which – in turn – are prompted by phenomenal appearances. Like Kant, Stevens is confident that there is a noumenal ding an sich behind the phenomena, but – more like Heidegger than Kant – Stevens wants to believe that the noumenal somehow shines through the phenomenal.
6 Stevens does not seem to have been a big reader of Coleridge. He told Elsie in a letter of 12 January 1909 that he had been reading Coleridge until midnight the night before, but found it “heavy work, reading things like that, that have so little in them that one feels to be contemporary, living” (Letters 121). And, many years later, he told Bernard Herringman (21 July 1953): “While, of course, I come down from the past, the past is my own and not something marked Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc. I know of no one who has been particularly important to me. My reality-imagination complex is entirely my own even though I see it in others” (Letters 792).
He did read I.A. Richards’ Coleridge on Imagination while preparing “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” (read at Princeton, May 1941), and in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” he praises Coleridge as a “one of the great figures” of the imagination, but adds that his views are out of date (Kermode 667).
7 Although the translation is credited to F.S. Flint, Eliot translated it himself – which need not imply that he agreed with Maritain’s argument; it may be that he simply could not afford to pay Flint. He told Herbert Read that Maritain’s argument seemed “a little specious and bergsonian.” However, he was sufficiently interested to buy and read Maritain’s Réflexions sur l’intelligence et sur sa vie propre. He told Read that although he found it “valuable and significant,” he was “a little disappointed with it” (Letter of 15 Dec. 1925. Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria).
8 In his brief, hostile review Praz notes that the notion of pure poetry was hardly new. He sees it as deriving from the Bergsonian notion of intuition – although he concedes that Bremond does not use the term “intuition,” and despite the fact that Bremond himself attributes the idea to Valéry. He cites Maritain’s 1927 book Art et scolastique in contradiction of Bremond’s claim that poetry, prayer and mysticism belong on a continuum (Criterion 8 [July 1929] 740–1).
9 Murry reviewed Thorold’s translation in Adelphi 4 (1927 403) and Poésie pure in the Times Literary Supplement (25 October 1928). Murry noted the intensity of the controversy in France, and observed that such a fuss was unimaginable in Britain where poetry was not taken so seriously. I was made aware of these reviews by Albert Gelpi (105 and 115).
10 The debate has been carefully studied by Jason Harding, who argues that the debates were engineered to boost circulation. While admitting that there were genuine differences between the two men, he points out that they remained cordial friends (37–43).
The pages of the Criterion were liberally peppered with articles addressing the relationship of poetry and religion. The debaters included Ramon Fernandez, Charles Mauron, and Herbert Read, as well as Maritain, Praz, Eliot, and Murry.
A sampling: Herbert Read, “The Nature of Metaphysical Poetry” 7 (April 1923) 246–66; John Middleton Murry, “Romanticism and the Tradition” 2 (April 1924) 273–95; Ramon Fernandez, “The Experience of Newman (to Felix Thumen)” 3, 9 (Oct. 1925) 84–102; Ramon Fernandez, “The Experience of Newman: Reply to Frederic Manning” 4, 4 (Oct. 1926) 645–58; T.S. Eliot, Review of Murry, Wells, Belloc on religion, 5 (May 1927) 253–9; Herbert Read, Review of Whitehead, Religion in the Making 5 (May 1927) 259–63; The Rev. D’Arcy, “The Thomistic Synthesis and Intelligence” 6, 3 (Sept. 1927) 210–28; T.S. Eliot, “Mr. Middleton Murry’s Synthesis” 6, 4 (Oct. 1927) 340–7; Charles Mauron, trans. T.S. Eliot. “Concerning Intuition” 6, 3 (Sept. 1927) 220–35; Ramon Fernandez, trans. T.S. Eliot. “A Note on Intelligence and Intuition” 6 (Oct. 1927) 332–9; John Middleton Murry, “Concerning Intelligence” 6 (Dec. 1927) 524–33; Mario Praz, Review of Pure Poetry, trans. Algar Thorold 8 (July 1929) 740–1; T.S. Eliot, Review of God by M. Murry 9 (April 1930) 333–6; Ramon Fernandez, trans. T.S. Eliot “A Humanist Theory of Value” 9 (Jan. 1930) 228–45.
11 Although Eliot was familiar with Maritain’s views, he was not in agreement with them. In a characteristic boast presenting itself as modesty – a rhetorical posture he learned from Bradley – Eliot summarized his ignorance: “My knowledge of Aquinas is slight: it is limited to the accounts of Gilson and de Wulf, to two volumes of extracts, one prepared by Professor Gilson, and the other by M. Truc, to two or three books by M. Maritain and modern Dominicans, and to the new edition of the Summa published by Desclée” (“Mr. Middleton Murry’s Synthesis.)”
And in a 1926 review, “The Idealism of Julien Benda,” Eliot had some unkind things to say about Maritain: “I have a warm personal admiration for M. Maritain, though it is as much for his saintly character as for his intelligence; but I have never seen a more romantic classicist, or a Thomist whose methods of thought were less like those of Aquinas. His occasional intemperance of language, and his occasional sentiment, hardly qualify him for the philosophical crown which M. Benda is waiting to bestow on someone” (488).
12 Stevens seems not to have been a reader of Maritain. However, they were both speakers at Holyoke in 1943. A decade later (17 March 1953), when Barbara Church mentioned that she was reading Maritain, Stevens asked her if it was “the collection of his Mellon lectures in Creative Intuition” that she was reading, and added,
“I have it and have looked at it but have not been able to start reading it yet.” Despite his tardiness in reading Maritain, he remarked, “Maritain is an extraordinary person, who fascinates me” (Letters 773).
I have not found any other references by Stevens to Maritain, so it seems a safe bet that he had not read the French Catholic apologist, despite his taste for all things French.
13 I am indebted to Professor Les Murison of the Classics Deptartment of the University of Western Ontario for identifying this passage. The reference that Maritain gave in the Criterion was incomplete. Instead of Enneads I. 6. 8., he gave only Enneads I.8.
14 It is worth noting that Eliot explicitly associates his argument in After Strange Gods with the Classic/Romantic opposition that animated his romantic/ classic debate with Murry, to which the pure poetry debate became attached. Explaining his choice of the term “orthodox,” he wrote: “I wished simply to indicate the connotation which the term tradition has for me, before proceeding to associate it with the concept of orthodoxy, which seems to me more fundamental (with its opposite, heterodoxy, for which I shall also use the term heresy) than the pair classicism-romanticism which is frequently used” (Eliot’s emphasis 21). Eliot’s reduction of “classical” to “orthodox,” and romantic to “heterodox” is a remarkable twisting of standard usage of these terms.
15 “Race” is a recurrent term in After Strange Gods, culminating in the infamous remark: “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking jews undesirable” (11). Eliot seems to have been infected by the notion – by no means restricted to Nazis at that time – that distinct human cultures were the expression of particular racial attributes of the populations possessing that culture. It was sufficiently widespread that Edward Sapir devotes an entire chapter (Ten: “Language, Race and Culture”) of his 1921 book, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York: Harcourt, Brace) to a debunking of the notion:
The man in the street does not stop to analyze his position in the general scheme of humanity. He feels that he is the representative of some strongly integrated portion of humanity – now thought of as a “nationality,” now as a “race” – and that everything that pertains to him as a typical representative of this large group somehow belongs together. If he is an Englishman, he feels himself to be a member of the “Anglo-Saxon” race, the “genius” of which race has fashioned the English language and the “Anglo-Saxon” culture of which the language is the expression. Science is colder. It inquires if these three types of classification – racial, linguistic, and cultural – are congruent, if their association is an inherently necessary one or is merely a matter of external history. The answer to the inquiry is not encouraging to “race” sentimentalists. (Quoted from www.bartleby.com/186/.)
16 Eliot read Underhill’s Mysticism as an undergraduate, and a heavily marked copy of it is to be found in his library (Gordon T.S. Eliot 89). One book she reviewed for Eliot was The Prophet Child by Gwendolyn Plunket Greene. The review appeared in Criterion 15 (Jan. 1936) 309–10. Underhill was favourably impressed by the book, and paraphrases its contents as follows: “‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy,’ and remains there long after we have ceased to notice it; long after the harsh dualism too often taught in the name of religion has succeeded in ‘the curtaining off of this and that from God,’ and so depriving puzzled humanity of one of its simplest means of access to the Eternal Loveliness” (310). It is unlikely that this vaguely Plotinian notion of aesthetic inspiration – reminiscent of Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” – would have appealed to Eliot. Nonetheless his willingness to have such a book reviewed by someone like Underhill attests at least to Eliot’s tolerance of discussions of mysticism.
17 This was a contribution to the extended debate between Murry and Eliot over the nature of classicism and romanticism, which turned on the issue of intuition vs reason. Eliot, of course, argued for classicism and rationality, Murry for romanticism and intuition.
Murry also reviewed Prayer and Poetry, the English translation of Prière et poésie, in the Times Literary Supplement (25 Oct. 1928). Despite Bremond’s kind words about Murry, he dismisses him as having nothing new to say to English readers. Like Souday, he sees Edgar Allen Poe as a precursor: “The argument had nothing new about it; it had been put forward with insistence by a number of the romantics and by theorists of l’art pour l’art. What distinguishes the movement of pure poetry is an additional step, basing the autonomy of poetry on an analysis of the poetic effect. In this respect Bremond’s campaign in France in the 1920’s was not very different from Poe’s in America three-quarters of a century earlier” (107).
18 The following passage indicates the degree to which Eliot has misread Bremond:
En tant qu’animal raisonnable, le poète est lucide ou devrait l’être; en tant que poète, il n’est pas, il ne peut l’être. L’activité rationnelle qui précède, prépare, accompagne et suit l’expérience poétique, ne sera jamais assez lucide. Mais l’expérience; mais l’inspiration elle-même ! ... Fagus dit encore: “ Mais je professe qu’il existe un sens poétique.” Eh! c’est là tout ce que nous demandons. Ce sens, on ne le définira jamais qu’en le distinguant de la pure raison. (La Poésie pure 91) [Insofar as he is a rational animal, the poet is lucid, or ought to be; insofar as he is a poet, he is not, he cannot be. The rational activity which precedes, prepares, accompanies and follows the poetic experience, will never be sufficiently lucid. But the experience, the inspiration itself ! ... Fagus says again: ‘But I maintain that a poetic sense exists.’ That is all that we ask. This sense, one will never define it except in distinguishing it from pure reason.”]
Fagus is one of the individuals with whom Bremond engages in a dialogue in La Poésie pure, but he does not provide any further identification – not even a first name.
19 “Poetry, is it necessary to point out, is the very opposite of literature ... Under the name of artistic sophistry ... can be grouped all the counterfeits of beauty which make the work a falsehood whenever the artist prefers himself to his work. This impurity is in our art the wound of original sin; it groans with it continually ... Literature puts on the work the grimace of personality. It seeks to adorn God” (“Poetry and Religion” 16–17).
20 Far from holding that poetry must follow laws, Bremond maintains that the pure poetry component in each poem is unique:
La poésie pure étant ce par quoi le poétique se distingue du prosaïque, il va de soi que la réalité mystérieuse qui répond à la notion de poésie pure, doit se retrouver à un degré quelconque dans toute oeuvre vraiment poétique, passée, présente ou future. Chaque poème est une création originale, qu’on n’avait pas vue encore: qu’on ne verra pas deux fois; mais l’idée même de poésie est universelle, comme l’idée d’homme ou d’oiseau. (La Poésie pure 71) [Pure poetry is that by which the poetic is distinguished from the prosaic; it follows that the mysterious reality which answers to the notion of pure poetry must be found to some degree in all truly poetic works, past, present, or future. Each poem is an original creation, which was never yet seen: that will not be seen twice; but the idea of poetry itself is universal, like the idea of a man or a bird.]
21 Surprisingly, Ted Hughes does not cite this well-known passage in support of his argument in Dancer to God that Eliot belongs to a shamanistic tradition of poetic expression.
22 That this condition of disbelief is thought to be definitional of the Postmodern underlines the false dichotomy that contemporary scholiasts postulate between the Modern and the Postmodern. It is certainly true, though, that Eliot resisted the Modern, as he would the Postmodern, since from his perspective they are the same. The cognitive state that Eliot assigns to Donne and his own contemporaries is indistinguishable from that which Rorty attributes to his “ironist.”
For a discussion of Rorty’s view, see my article “Richard Rorty Lays Down the Law.”
23 It would take us too far from the subject at hand to pursue the matter, but it is worth noting that Sparrow’s characterization of the nature of Eliot-inspired poetry rides roughshod over Eliot’s own view of his practice. We have seen that Eliot completely rejects Richards’ behavioural theory of poetry, and also Richards’ assessment of his poetic practice – which is expressionistic, not impressionistic.
24 Stevens’ characterization of the work is a little misleading. Bremond’s preface says that the debate between himself and Robert de Souza “began with the lecture which I gave last autumn at the annual public meetings of the Institute” (my translation), but he explains that the text is based on articles he published in Nouvelles Littéraires on 31 October, 7,14, 21, and 28 November; and 5, 12, 19, and 26 December 1825 [obviously a typo for 1925], and 16 January 1926 (9). The first section, entitled “La Poésie Pure” (15–27) is identified as the lecture he gave to the Academy on 24 October 1925. This was not his inaugural address on being elected to the Academy, for he took his seat on 22 May 1924.
25 It is a little odd that Stevens characterizes Bremond as following Bergson, for Bergson is mentioned only once (107–9), and there in the context of readers recommending Bergson to him as one who would support his view. Bremond pleads ignorance of philosophy, but quotes a couple of passages from Bergson.
It would be more accurate to describe Bremond as following Shelley and Blake. Bremond himself identified the modern “theoreticians” of pure poetry as Edgar Allan Poe, Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry – from whom he borrowed the term poésie pure. But he claims that the tradition goes back to the eighteenth century (15). Perhaps Stevens is recalling Fernandez’s accusation in “Poésie et Biographie” that Bremond was an illegitimate child of Bergson.
26 “A l’idée de poésie pure est alors liée celle d’inspiration, de génie qui souffle, de facilité suprême et divine, un état de grâce que bien naturellement l’on compare à la communion avec Dieu” (71).
27 Stevens did not have much to say about imagism. One aphorism from Adagio– “Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this” – might be construed as a complaint that Imagism rejected the sublime (Opus Posthumous 187). Another comment is found in his assessment of W.C. Williams (“Rubbings of Reality” Opus Posthumous 244): “Imagism (as one of Williams’ many involvements, however long ago) is not something superficial. It obeys an instinct. Moreover, imagism is an ancient phase of poetry. It is something permanent. Williams is a writer to whom writing is the grinding of a glass, the polishing of a lens by means of which he hopes to be able to see clearly. His delineations are trials. They are rubbings of reality.” The image of “rubbings” – as in images transferred passively from tombstones to paper – once again suggests that Stevens thinks of imagism as fundamentally superficial, not “seeing into the heart of things.” This supposition is further supported by his remark to Hi Simons on “Variations on a Summer Day” (29 Dec. 1939. Letters 346): “In a world permanently enigmatical, to hear and see agreeable things involves something more than mere imagism. One might do it deliberately and in that particular poem I did it deliberately.”
28 The two modes are not as far apart as appears however, since there is a strong Symbolist and Swedenborgian component in Imagism – at least as Pound understands it. For both, the physical world symbolizes a hidden spiritual world, accessible to the poet or visionary through the mechanism of correspondences. Swedenborg imagines a hierarchy of perception: the lowest in vegetable, then animal, then human or spiritual, and finally angelic. Where vegetable perception can perceive only heat, moisture, and light, the animal has the same five senses as humans, but cannot perceive the generalities expressed in language. Finally angelic perception is still higher, exemplified for mortals in artistic expression. Blake illustrates the principle with his remark that whereas to the ordinary man the sun appears much like a guinea, to the man of vision it appears as a host of angels singing loud hosannas.
29 It is perhaps worth quoting Sparrow on the gulf between Bremond and poetic practice of the day:
The difference between Bremond’s theory of pure poetry and the practice of those whom that theory seeks to justify is that the incommunicables that they wish to communicate are of different kinds. Their aim has been to express not the universal, the infinite experience revealed in moments of rare exaltation, when the individual seems to lose his self, but rather the particular, the individual, the unique at the other end of the scale. Speaking broadly, it is true to say that during the last half-century writers have been increasingly preoccupied with the individual; they have tried more and more fully to describe the interior life of their characters, and to represent not a world of feelings and objects viewed by a detached observer, but the impressions of individuals themselves. (Sparrow 100–1)
Although Sparrow takes no notice of Stevens, Stevens’ poetic practice falls between these two extremes: a mystical access of the universal and eternal, on the one hand, and the expression of a personal and idiosyncratic perception, on the other.
30 One place where the term does occur several times is in his 1958 introduction to Paul Valéry: The Art of Poetry, and, as in the following remark, it is to denigrate Valéry’s poetry as merely delightful: “We read the essays because, as Valéry himself says, ‘there is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography.’ We could almost say that Valéry’s essays form a part of his poetical works. We read them for their own sake, for the delight in following the subtleties of thought which moves like a trained dancer, and which has every resource of language at its command; for the pleasure of sudden illuminations even when they turn out to be feux follets; for the excitement of an activity which always seems on the point of catching the inapprehensible, as the mind continues indefatigably to weave its fine logo-daedal web” (xxii).
31 Bremond would sympathize with the view Maritain expressed in his Criterion article, “Poetry and Religion” [Part Two], that the Surrealist mode is Satanic: “The air we breathe is saturated with spiritual ordure, we are returned to the vast night of the pagan agony, in which man is no longer only concerned with his miserable flesh, but with a flesh whipped by the angels of Satan, where nature is wholly clothed in obscene signs, a nightmare which literary Freudism uses everywhere to multiply the obsession. In order to work in such a world without being too defiled, what presumption it would be not to arm oneself with the severest rules of ascetic discipline!” (225). Of course, Freud’s theory of the subconscious is thoroughly secular, and does not support the view of the Surrealists that the subconscious is a portal to the au delà. For Freud it is simply the repository of suppressed desires that have been disguised by what he calls the “dream work.”
32 (My translation):
C’est toujours le même scandale: on pense que nous sacrifions aux troubles lueurs de l’instinct les précisions lumineuses de la raison, et que, sous le nom de poésie pure, nous voulons glorifier le pathos, le vague, l’obscur, l’infra-rationnel, «l’obscène chaos» où se débattait la conscience avant le Fiat Lux de l’entendement. Non, mille fois non!
La connaissance particulière que nous étudions chez le poète ou chez le mystique, n’est pas infra, elle est supra-rationnelle; raison supérieure, plus raisonnable que l’autre ... il est encore d’une autre façon, et plus haute, son expérience proprement poétique lui permettant de dépasser l’ordre abstrait des notions, des raisonnements, et d’atteindre le concret, le réel même, comme on peut l’atteindre ici-bas.
33 In Creative Evolution Bergson, too, denigrates the rational intellect as merely the surface of much deeper human cognitive capacity: “In explaining life by intellect, it limits too much the meaning of life: intellect, such at least as we find it in ourselves, has been fashioned by evolution during the course of progress; it is cut out of something larger, or, rather, it is only the projection, necessarily on a plane, of a reality that possesses both relief and depth. It is this more comprehensive reality that true finalism ought to reconstruct, or, rather, if possible, embrace in one view” (59. My emphasis). Even though he does not say it in so many words, it would seem that Stevens holds much the same view. The irrational is for him the residue of human cognition left over after one subtracts the rational. On a mundane level, there is no doubt that our perceptions are not rationally directed or controlled. Reason can only work with concepts. It is true, however, that, barring pathology, the bulk of our concepts bear a principled relation to our percepts – though not – as Rorty has reminded us – an incorrigible one. The work of the poetic imagination on this view is to fashion new concepts that more adequately, or more appropriately represent the world we experience: to function, as Shelley put it, as “unacknowledged legislators.”
34 For example in the 1929 essay “Experiment in Criticism”: “For so long as poetry and fiction and such things are written, its first purpose must always be what it always has been: to give a peculiar kind of pleasure which has something constant in it throughout the ages, however difficult and various our explanations of that pleasure may be” (232).
1 Process and Reality 7. The Gifford Lectures, The University of Edinburgh, 1927–28. Whitehead was the senior co-author with Russell of Principia Mathematica. However, unlike Russell, Whitehead eschewed Humanism and attempted in this work to reconcile philosophy and religion in a manner that Stevens might have found congenial if he had known of it – though Stevens would have substituted “poetry” for “religion” in the following: “Religion should connect the rational generality of philosophy with the emotions and purposes springing out of existence in a particular society, in a particular epoch, and conditioned by particular antecedents. Religion is the translation of general ideas into particular thoughts, particular emotions, and particular purposes; it is directed to the end of stretching individual interest beyond its self-defeating particularity” (15).
2 Of course, Auden – like most of his generation – began as a Communist fellow traveller in his youth. But his generation’s “activism” did not at any time suppose that the arts could reform culture and civilization other than as a handmaiden of political movements, that is, as propaganda.
3 Despite Ricks’ expansion on Kenner’s observation that “every noun, verb and adjective [in Ash-Wednesday] pulls two ways” (Eliot and Prejudice 211–14) by examining the recurrence of the adjective “between,” he does not allude to the in-between state represented by the period between Christ’s death and his resurrection, and ritually memorialized in Lent.
4 “Poet and Saint,” Dial 82 (May 1927) 124.
5 “The Devotional Poets of the Seventeenth Century: Donne, Herbert, Crashaw,” Listener 2 (26 March 1930) 552, nos. 1 and 2. Broadcast 21 (March 1930).
6 “Studies in Sanctity: 8 George Herbert” Spectator 148 (12 March 1932) 361.
7 In this Eliot has radically changed his opinion from that expressed in “Religion and Literature,” first published in The Faith That Illuminates, ed. V.A. Demant 1935. He there distinguishes three varieties of “religious literature. The first is literature whose subject is religious – the Bible, and theological works. The second is devotional literature, which he concedes is typically minor, mentioning Vaughan, Southwell, Crashaw, Herbert, and Hopkins (Kermode Selected Prose 98–9).
8 Stevens excluded six of the poems published in Poetry from the book version. They have been printed in Opus Posthumous 101–4. Some (numbered IX, X, and XI in OP) read as rejected versions of poems that were retained, and others as simply rejected poems.
9 William Wordsworth, “Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads” in the Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1936) 734.
10 Stevens’ stock answer to queries about his beliefs was to deny any important provenance for them. For example in reply to Bernard Herringman in a letter of 21 July 1953, he refused to say anything about his religious beliefs: “I am afraid that you expect a monumental explanation of my religion. But I dismiss your question by saying that I am a dried-up Presbyterian, and let it go at that because my activities are not religious.” With respect to his derivation from the English romantics, he claims independence: “While, of course, I come down from the past, the past is my own and not something marked Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc. I know of no one who has been particularly important to me. My reality-imagination complex is entirely my own even though I see it in others” (Letters 792). I think he deserves to be taken at his word on these matters.
That said, the influence of George Santayana cannot be entirely discounted. Lentricchia, for example, claims that Stevens “read and was moved to a lifetime of meditation by [Santayana’s] Interpretations of Poetry and Religion” (Modernist Quartet 4). Nor can we discount the background of the Romantic aesthetic which no twentieth-century poet could escape.
11 Apart from those commentators attracted to Eliot because of his conversion to Anglicanism, most comment on the sequence has slid off the religious aspect of Ash-Wednesday, preferring to consider it in the light of other, more secular concerns. Christopher Ricks’ discussion of it in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice sees it as moving on from “the dreary numbness of the hollow men addicted to their emptiness,” and aspiring “to the spiritual void which may with grace issue in spiritual life” (228), but the burden of his discussion stresses Eliot’s “animosity” toward the world.
Louis L. Martz, in an admirably sensitive reading of the poem, including the context of its biblical and liturgical allusions, stresses its relation to Eliot’s marital situation. He points out that the 1930 edition is dedicated “To my Wife.” It is, he says “a dedication that gives particular poignancy to the well-known echo of Cavalcanti’s lament for his separation by exile from his beloved lady” (Martz in Cowan 189). He pursues this love song theme on the next page: “One may wonder why Eliot, recently converted to the Church of England, should so insistently in the poem echo the Roman liturgy rather than the Book of Common Prayer. But this choice is not ecclesiastical: it is thematic and poetical, a part of the decorum created by the love-poetry of Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch” (190). While Martz persuades me of the relevance of Vivien to the sequence, I remain convinced that it is nonetheless primarily a meditation on his conversion. No doubt that conversion exacerbated the tensions already manifest in their relationship, and those tensions are reflected in the poem, as Martz argues. But even he makes no effort to occlude the poem’s focus on the struggle to find belief.
12 Not atypically, thirteen years after the explanation he gave Hi Simons, Stevens gave his Italian translator, Poggioli, a completely different explanation of the last line: “A sea of ex means a purely negative sea. The realm of has-been without interest or provocativeness” (25 July 1953 Letters 783).
13 The gourd reference is rather opaque, but the following passage from the fourth book of Jonah might be relevant. God had sent Jonah to Nineveh to preach to the citizens about their evil ways. They reformed, and God pardoned them – much to Jonah’s annoyance:
5 So Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city.
6 And the LORD God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd.
7 But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered.
8 And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live.
9 And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death.
10 Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night:
11 And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle.
The point of the story would seem to be that forgiveness is a greater principle than vengeance. If Eliot had this passage in mind, “the fruit of the gourd” would be humility and forgiveness. But there is no way of being sure of the allusion.
14 In the entry for “spirit,” the Catholic Encyclopaedia has the following: “In Theology, the uses of the word are various. In the New Testament, it signifies sometimes the soul of man (generally its highest part, e.g., ‘the spirit is willing’), sometimes the supernatural action of God in man, sometimes the Holy Ghost (‘the Spirit of Truth Whom the world cannot receive’). The use of this term to signify the supernatural life of grace is the explanation of St. Paul’s language about the spiritual and the carnal man and his enumeration of the three elements, spirit, soul, and body, which gave occasion to the error of the Trichotomists” (1 Thess.: 5, 23; Eph.: 4, 23).
15 In the 1918 poem “Whispers of Immortality,” Eliot also invokes the bone and marrow separately. But there is no spiritual or mental component invoked. Speaking of John Donne as “another” preoccupied with death like Webster, he wrote:
He knew the anguish of the marrow
The ague of the skeleton;
No contact possible to flesh Allayed the fever of the bone.
He moves on to Grishkin after a break marked by suspension points, contrasting the temptation of the pleasures of the flesh with the anguish of introspection:
Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye
Is underlined for emphasis;
Uncorseted, her friendly bust
Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.
16 Christopher Ricks first pointed out these elisions. He regards their suppression as motivated by a desire to avoid appearing excessively illiberal: “It is not that this song needed to eschew tension, but that the needed tension was that of distance not distaste. Which is why Ash-Wednesday does not accommodate ‘Spattered and worshipped.’ Or ‘With worm eaten petals.’ ‘In a society like ours, worm-eaten with Liberalism, the only thing possible for a person with strong convictions is to state a point of view and leave it at that’ [After Strange Gods 13]: but in Ash-Wednesday, a poem not bent upon society, let alone upon ‘a society like ours,’ such a line as ‘With worm eaten petals’ would feel worm-eaten with illiberalism, with animosity” (Eliot and Prejudice 228).
17 His less modest friend, Ezra Pound, did plan an “epic,” The Cantos, which would have articulated a modern equivalent of Dante’s journey amongst the dead, and his ascent into paradise. But that project remained unfinished on Pound’s death. Pound’s Paradiso never amounted to more than a few fragments.
18 Eliot cited the offending remark: “In an essay of very great interest published in The Criterion for July, 1925, Mr. I.A. Richards did me the honour of employing one of my poems as evidence on behalf of a theory he was there expounding. He observed, in a footnote, that the author in question, “by effecting a complete separation between his poetry and all beliefs, and this without any weakening of the poetry, has realised what might otherwise have remained largely a speculative possibility” (15).
19 Eliot did overcome that Unitarian prejudice against grace, though it is not clear that he felt it had been granted to him. In “Christianity & Communism” (16 March 1932) the first article in the Listener series “The Modern Dilemma,” he declared his “orthodoxy,” while qualifying it as imperfect, implying that he had not received an “infusion” of grace: “In all that I say I shall speak from the point of view of orthodox Christianity. At least, I aim at orthodoxy. For heresy, which consists in emphasising one aspect of the mystery to the exclusion of the other, is a natural tendency of the mind; a complete living orthodoxy is (except through the infusion of exceptional grace) almost impossible to the frail human being at every moment of his life; which is one reason why the Church is necessary” (382).
Of course, to rely on such an “infusion” would imply the Lutheran doctrine of salvation by faith alone, a doctrine that renders the Church unnecessary.
20 This may be a recollection of Emerson’s remark in “Self-Reliance,” that “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man ... and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons” (Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1957 154–5).
If so, it is instructive to compare it to Eliot’s ironic allusion to the passage in “Sweeney Erect”:
(The lengthened shadow of a man
Is history, said Emerson
Who had not seen the silhouette
Of Sweeney straddled in the sun).
Eliot – admittedly not the Anglican Eliot – stresses the bestiality of mankind in the Sweeney poems. Stevens appears to be celebrating something more like his divinity, at least the human capacity to fully realize the wonder of creation, of things as they are.
21 For example in “Imagination as Value” (1949):
The imagination is one of the great human powers. The romantic belittles it. The imagination is the liberty of the mind. The romantic is a failure to make use of that liberty. It is to the imagination what sentimentality is to feeling. It is a failure of the imagination precisely as sentimentality is a failure of feeling. The imagination is the only genius. It is intrepid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction. The achievement of the romantic, on the contrary, lies in minor wish-fulfilments and it is incapable of abstraction. In any case and without continuing to contrast the two things, one wants to elicit a sense of the imagination as something vital. In that sense one must deal with it as metaphysics. (Kermode 727–8)
22 Frank Doggett used “The Owl and the Sarcophagus” to set the theme for Stevens’ Poetry of Thought (11–12). Doggett is not so much interested in articulating the afterworld that the poem postulates as in illustrating his own argument that Stevens’ underlying “thesis” is “that the mind creates forms and personifications, that it humanizes reality in order that it may live on its own terms” (11).
For Joseph Riddell: “‘The Owl in the Sarcophagus’ is a parable of the mind’s war with its own nature, a contemplative exercise which verifies and mocks the mythological imagination, and the soothing personae it has created as a stay against mortality” (The Clairvoyant Eye 240). Riddell seems oblivious to the elegiac nature of the poem – a feature that Doggett notes. Neither of them is particularly concerned to draw out the nature of the afterworld, beyond its imagined irreality. Neither Doggett nor Riddell draws attention to the poem’s connection with the death of Henry Church – no doubt because Stevens’ letters were published too late for either scholar to have consulted them.
Later discussions of the poem seem to descend from Bloom’s reading (Bloom 281–92). Most take account of its relation to the death of Henry Church. Joan Melville surveys them in “Inventions of Farewell.” Melville does address the nature of the afterlife portrayed in the poem, but her reading and mine scarcely intersect. She is primarily concerned to situate Stevens’ portrayal of the afterlife within a European Christian and Romantic tradition. C. Roland Wagner also takes full account of the poem’s relation to Church’s death in his 1988 paper “Wallace Stevens: The Concealed Self.” Most other recent attention to the poem that I have found tends to read it from a Freudian perspective (Wagner) or a Jungian perspective. One of the more extended is Joseph Carroll’s in Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction (214–36). Carroll follows Bloom’s identification of the female figure with the mother, and also finds it to be “one of Stevens’ most complex and difficult poems” (214).
23 “Godolphin” is not a word known to the OED. Other commentators have not noticed that it is the name of the eponymous hero of Bulwer-Lytton’s 1833 novel Godolphin, who is described in the preface as “the man of poetical temperament, out of his place alike among the trifling idlers and the bustling actors of the world” – a characterization appropriate enough for Stevens’ allegorical figure of Peace. However, I have not found any reference to either Bulwer-Lytton, or the novel by Stevens elsewhere.
24 “Bold” would appear to be a typographical error for “mold.” However, Kermode’s Collected Poetry and Prose also has “bold.” I can’t imagine what “broken bold” could mean in this context, but “broken mold” makes perfect sense.
25 None of the commentaries I have seen picks up on this analogy.
26 Lea Baechler points out in “Pre-Elegiac Affirmations in ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’” that Stevens drew on Edmund Wilson’s account of a visit to Santayana in the April 1946 number of The New Yorker. Despite the date of that report, she assumes – as I do – that the poem was written only shortly before Santayana’s death.
Like most commentators, Baechler refers to the convalescent hospital run by the Blue Nuns as a “convent.” Her excellent commentary focuses on drawing out the relevance of Wilson’s report and the relationship between Stevens and Santayana, rather than treating the poem as a meditation on death.
27 No doubt the phrase “book and candle” is a deliberate evocation of the bell, book, and candle employed in Extreme Unction, the last rites of the Catholic Church. However, despite dying in a Catholic hospital, Santayana did not receive Extreme Unction (McCormick 504).
28 Renan’s study was the most celebrated. Although first published in 1867, it went through many editions. It is likely that the library owned the English translation published by Matthiesen and Co. in 1901, which was based on the thirteenth edition. The following paragraph from Renan’s preface gives some idea of the tone of the study:
At the bottom of all discussion on such matters is the question of the supernatural. If the miracle and the inspiration of certain books are actual facts, our method is detestable. If the miracle and the inspiration of some books are beliefs without any reality, our method is the proper one. Now, the question of the supernatural is determined to us with absolute certainty, by this simple reason, that there is no room for belief in a thing of which the world can offer no experimental trace. We do not believe in a miracle, just as we do not believe in dreams, in the devil, in sorcery, or in astrology. Have we any need to refute step by step the long reasonings of astrology in order to deny that the stars influence human events? No. It is sufficient for this wholly negative, as well as demonstrable experience, that we give the best direct proof – such an influence has never been proved. (xiv)
29 Notes is another of Eliot’s works that has drawn a lot of hostile commentary for its elitist and retrograde political stance. I endorse David Chintiz’s defence of its politics in T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide: “Although Eliot’s cultural solution in Notes – essentially to shore up the fragments of a class structure that was already, as he understood, failing – is uncompelling, his position seems to me less duplicitous than it does to certain recent critics who believe that Eliot pleads a concern for ‘culture’ as an excuse for political reaction. One might rather suggest, I think, with still better reasons, that it is his concern for culture, however well or ill placed, that explains much of Eliot’s politics. In any case, distress over the loss of subcultural differences in the face of economic and social convergence is hardly a right-wing monopoly” (171).