T.S.

ELIOT : THE PERCEPTION OF A CRITIC

Indrani Choudhuri Dutt

1. Eliot’s view that only a poet can be a critic of poetry.

2. Eliot as a Classicist in literature.
3. What is Classical about Eliot’s criticism
4. Role of Eliot as a literary critic.

T.S.Eliot arrived as a poet in a very definite context. He wrote poetry and criticism with an objective,
which was at one level, admittedly, very literary and reflective of a belief as an artist. This has led to
observations that Eliot is a defensive critic, defending his own kind of poetry. This sort of idea is
indebted to Eliot’s own essay with a helpful title for those who find him limited. The reference is to
the 1961 essay “To Criticize a Critic”. There Eliot says quite clearly that he “shyly intrudes” in the
category of critics who are essentially poets who have “written some literary criticism”. He also
clarifies his position as a critic in a relative sense and says

“Yet I must acknowledge my relationship to the man who made those statements, and in spite of all these
exceptions, I continue to identify with the author.” (TCC, 14)

It is clear from his clarification that he holds a more catholic position in 1961 but there is no
fundamental deviation. Further to this he also holds that there are some essays, especially those on
individual authors, which he feels has chance of retaining value for “future readers”. He admits that
the essays on general principles do not seem to him correspondent to his perception in 1961. He tells
us very clearly that back then, at the turn of the century he was “ in reaction, not only against
Georgian Poetry, but against Georgian criticism”. (TCC, 16)

Georgian Poetry by the likes of W.H.Davies, Walter de la Mare, Lascelles Abercombie and others
were allied to the approach of the late nineteenth century Aesthetes like Swinburne. In their poetry of
predominantly idealized pastoral presentation and mystic atmosphere the reality of the modern urban
metropolis, grappling with materialism and loss of spirituality did not find its voice. Eliot was a
sensitive turn of the century personality and there was no way he was going to relate to ghostly houses
animated by disembodied whisperers or ruminate over the gentle dropping of warm rain. In 1917-18
Eliot was conscious that the inheritance of Romantic poetry had not been seen in the spirit of
intellectual tradition; had it happened then the value worth retaining and imbibing would have been
identified. In the absence of the insight of right tradition19th century Romantic Poetry had been
absorbed indiscriminately and the result is the non-referential arcadia of Georgian Poetry. Hugh
Kenner in T.S Eliot:The Invisible Poet quotes Eliot in 1918 as commenting

“...because we have never learned to criticize Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth (poets of assured though modest
merit), Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth punish us from their graves with annual scourge of the Georgian
Anthology”. (Kenner , 93)

This comment may be read with reference to Eliot’s confessional words in “To Criticize the Critic”.
When in that essay he had cited certain “exceptions” to the fundamental standpoint he held as a critic
one of the exceptions he genuinely disagreed with was his youthful proneness to “errors of tone”. In
the 1961 essay it would seem that these “errors” were responsible to make certain postulations
negatively suggestive. In the 1918 comment quoted by Kenner the aside has that unfortunate
complacency in the critic’s voice which is likely to indicate that the poetry of the Romantics lack the
sense of ‘fact’ and the sense of’right’ and cannot form part of the living intellectual tradition. This
presumptive gesture, if viewed without reference to the context of real disparity between the poet’s
voice and his existential world, will very easily appear to be a limited and defensive critical approach.
In 1961 Eliot is not unaware of the popular nature of statements made in the early critical essays and
accords them the status of immediacy and even sensationalism. Commenting on the impressionability
of his earlier essays he ascribes the presumptiveness to the dogmatism of youth and insecurity of
disagreement. Eliot and his poetic friends emerging in the first decade of 20 th century America had to
conceal their nervousness as new poets and attack the existent, acclaimed poets continuing the
escapist and over-refined introspectiveness of the descendants of the Romantic poets. In order to do so
Eliot had opted for deliberate posturing with Bradleyan deconstruction as a role model. F.H Bradley,
the philosopher of the Neo-Idealist school of thought and Eliot’s subject of his Ph D thesis
“Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H.Bradley”, emphasized on the cognitive quest
and not in the end. Hugh Kenner tells us

“Bradley, we remember, without difficulty collapsed all comforting hypotheses into the domain of Appearance,
and left the reader wondering what it was he wanted...beneath Eliot’s bland surface glows the unwavering
conviction that the poet...possess chiefly a more honest mind than most minds, yielding him at the end of
rigorous ardours the intuition of some hidden reality...” (Kenner, 95)

Kenner’s assessment holds good up to a point with reference to Eliot’s adaption of the Bradleyan
method and intent. Eliot never gave consent to Bradley’ notion of the Absolute and though the
Bradleyan idea of the quest with emphatic permission to scepticism, scrutiny and deconstruction at all
points in the trajectory was accepted, the emergent response was not at any point intuitive. Dr. Manju
Jain refers to Eliot’s comments in his thesis in T.S.Eliot: Selected Poems, with Critical Readings and
Comprehensive Notes.

“Eliot emphasizes that Bradley’s Absolute, as the all-inclusive whole, representative of ultimate Reality, is not
found in an abstract, hypothetical concept of unity and wholeness into which isolated finite experiences are
transfused and lose their individual identity, but in the finite experiences themselves: ‘experiences so mad and
strange that they will be boiled away before you boil them down to a homogenous mass’”. (Jain 20)

In “The Function of Criticism” (1923) Eliot sharply retorts to the scholar Middleton Murry’s
proposition of the Inner Voice as source of honest understanding. Eliot says that if the theory of the
Inner Voice is accepted then there is no use determining any fundamental principles of criticism (or
creativity because for Eliot much of creativity is critical). He tells his readers

“Why have principles, when one has the inner voice? If I like a thing, that is all I want; and if enough of us,
shouting all together, like it, that should be all that you (who don’t like it) ought to want”. (SE 29)

The figure of the critic that emerges then is not simply that of a youthful, somewhat zealous persona,
jealously guarding a newly attained creative territory. It was more the alert mind, scrupulously
searching for a specific vantage point. That point would adapt the character of the quest in Bradley,
following a pattern of selection and rejection; it was not to be confused with the intuitive point of
view as commonly understood. As Eliot saw intuition, it was correspondent to idiosyncratic and
whimsical abandonment, without any recourse to self-inspection. The Georgian poets with their
uncritical imbibing of the poetics of the 19th century Romantics were intuitive in just such a way. Such
a conclusion would be inevitably drawn by one who could not see in Georgian Poetry any opposition
to the pastoral and mystical poetic world. To posit some element as real in any absolute sense would
be untenable for Eliot who knew the hollowness of civilized refinement; it was the insensitivity of
refinement that made societies withdraw into a state of denial and consider their preferences as true
reality.

The pattern of the quest Eliot adopted as he writes in The Function of Criticism is to develop a sense
of the right, and not to confuse this sense with personal liking. For the critic and the creator to develop
this sense of the right, is a ‘laborious’ effort farthest in intent than the commonplace notion of
intuition. In the Athaneum reviewing Robert Lynd’s Old and New Masters he asserts that it is
imperative for the critic to compare, analyse, and he has to do so with sensitivity, intelligence,
curiosity, intensity of passion and knowledge. As a critic (and as an artist) Eliot searches for an
objectivity which is not merely a sense of detachment. It is rather an intense desire to go as near to the
mystery of reality in experience. There are always questions to be asked and though all or any
question may never elicit answers there is in the very act of questioning a very necessary self-control.
In a review of a newly published book of Kipling’s verse in the May issue of the Athaneum 1919 Eliot
employing comparison and analysis and focussing on the ‘right’ comments

“And like the orator they (Swinburne and Kipling) are personal: not by revelation, but by throwing themselves
in and gesturing the emotion of the moment. The emotion is not “there” simply, coldly independent of the
author, of the audience, there and forever like Shakespeare’s and Aeschylus’ emotions; it is present so long only
as the author is on the platform and compels you to feel it.” (Kenner 89)

The critic has liberated himself from influences extraneous to the works; he discerns that Swinburne
and Kipling are good versifiers and also creates impact upon the minds of their readers; but they
express their personalities when presenting the experience; thus the poetic emotion does not belong to
the experience but is an interpretation from a point of view.

It is true that Eliot says in To Criticize the Critic “I was implicitly defending the sort of poetry I and
my friends wrote” (TCC, 16) but the ‘defence’ was also an effort to learn in terms of application. As
noted by Hugh Kenner, in Eliot’s assessment of Kipling’s verse Eliot’s critical observation of the
necessity of distilled emotion pertaining to immediate experience to creativity, there is a sense of
freedom. The freedom arises from having recognized as a poet dealing with the poetics of another
creative mind just what ought to be the poetic concern. In short the sense of ‘right’, distinguished
from impulsive liking, of which he speaks in “The Function of Criticism” is acquired in close dealings
with another creative mind rather than when commandeered to do so by exigencies of periodical
publications. In the review of Lynd he says clearly that the periodical public is impatient and the hard
labour of undertaking comparison and analysis to evolve the critical intent is likely to test their
patience. Consequently much of the forays in literary supplements and periodicals had to be assured
dictates which sound complete and stable. It is possible that Eliot’s own irritation of having to tolerate
commissioned writings led him to be critical of early general prescriptions. But as he observed in To
Criticize the Critic there is in retrospect nothing that he would overhaul in any decisive way.

II

There are some recurring emphases in T.S.Eliot’s literary criticism. Obviously the first to strike any
reader is the importance of ‘tradition’ and ‘order’. There is in Eliot’s development of ‘tradition’ the
idea of a fundamental intellectual perception—a thorough understanding of experience in a collective
consciousness- where the emotional response i validated by the assent of the objective and analytic
mind. This collective consciousness is dynamic and its understanding, incessantly, added to,
subtracted from, modified and constitutes Eliot’s ‘order’. There is also a great deal of stress on the
‘right’ and the ‘fact’ of immediate experience because these are necessary elements for intellectual
assent. Thus it is Eliot’s belief that the tools of comparison and analysis are not patent to the critic but
are also functional aids in creative activity. They are to be constantly vigilant so that a creative
consciousness remains perennially critical and the critical consciousness eclectic. It is in terms of the
vigilant approach and impartiality attendant upon the spirit of comparison that the sanctity of the
‘order’ depends. There is no space for impulsive liking, whimsicality, indulgence, idiosyncracy of raw
emotion and it is Eliot’s conviction that unless guarded by the intellect creative and critical perception
may become abstract and worse wilful thinking. The personal that becomes integral to the ‘order’ is
the response to the fact of experience, that is ‘right’ or ‘just’ (read ‘suitable’, ‘appropriate’, with no
sense of excess or being ‘misfit’); the distilled self’s response is the ‘pure’ emotion not a sincere point
of view.

It is possible to read in Eliot’s idea of ‘tradition’ and ‘order’ and his severely pruned version of
‘personality’ austerity associated with the formal nature of Latin and Greek Literature. In common
parlance these represent the Classics. Our ordinary understanding of the term ‘classical’ gives us an
idea of an intense, disciplined rendition that touches a universal chord and becomes in a refracted way
the expression of the abiding in human experience. The Oxford dictionary suggests that the restraint
evident in literature of antiquity is one of the implications of the term “classic” and it would lead to
the speculation that if a work were to attain classic proportion it should not be in any way exaggerated
and exhibitionist. At the same time it is thought that the urgency towards attaining the abiding
deprives the classical of the warmth of ‘human’ character that is inherent in its intimate and
unguarded private response. When Eliot pronounced in his Preface to the prose works of Bishop
Launcelot Andrewes that “I am an Anglo Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in
politics”, he led in general to think that he is the paradigm of conservatism. While Eliot’s declaration
that particular personal response is intellectually suspect as total and valid truth is a supportive
reference, his remark “ a classicist in literature” should not be rashly adjudged as simply reactionary.

Eliot’s understanding of “classic” and “classical” is distinguished from a specialized knowledge of

literature of antiquity. In “The Classic and the Man of Letters” (1942) he makes certain points clear
though the clarification is additive; the points are significant repetition from earlier essays in The
Sacred Wood (1921). In the 1942 essay Eliot states that whether or not the man of letters is trained in
literature of antiquity is irrelevant as a yardstick of his being part of the classic club. He refers to
Shakespeare and Milton as representing extreme cases of relationship of artists to classical literature.
He remarks

“The most instructive contrast of degree of education within the same type is that provided by Shakes
peare and Milton, our two greatest poets. We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so
little knowledge to such great account: we must couple Milton and Dante, in saying that never has a
poet possessed of such great learning so completely justified the acquisition of it”. (TCC 148)

In the same essay he adds that for an artist to be classical there has to be an environment in which
individuality extended from a shared exposure to the “wisdom of the ancients” and values of tradition.
It happened that in the Renaissance the ‘tradition’ was moulded by texts of the antiquity but it is not
claimed that antiquity per se is the basis of ‘tradition’ as Eliot deemed it. In“What is a
Classic?”(1944) he remarks with reference to the making of Virgil as a classical artist,
“It did happen that the history of Rome was such, the character of the Latin language was such, that a t a certain
moment a uniquely classical poet was possible: though we must remember that it needed that particular poet,
and a lifetime of labour on the part of that poet, to make the classic out of his material.”(OPP, 54)

We shall note that in his time Virgil was not referring to antiquity in the sense it was understood in the
Renaissance; Virgil was part of what later became ‘antiquity’. The point is made even more clear in
the case of Shakespeare. Eliot stresses that Shakespeare’s nurturing was not in terms of direct contact
to the tradition of Latin and Greek learning as it was in the case of Milton and other University
graduates. For Shakespeare in the 16 th century as John Bunyan in the 17 th century and Abraham
Lincoln in the 19th century the exposure was indirect. The medium of their nurturing was essentially
the vernacular – the English language. The wisdom and values that structure Eliot’s idea of tradition
are the result of a civilized (as opposed to renegade and eccentric) consciousness shaped by deep and
honest understanding of human experience. The position of the classicist is that of existing in a state
of taste. It is a position farthest from Eliot’s idea of vulgarity – that of being fragmentary, topical,
trivial. To be divorced from the continuing European tradition, as was the inclination in the 40’s, was
to head towards what Francois Lyotard was to call in The Post Modern Condition “an incredulity of
metanarratives”. Eliot decried the contemporary tendency towards specialization seeing in it
isolationist intent and suspected that the man of letters will succumb to it given the trend. In 1921
Eliot had been less apprehensive but even twenty years back he valued a spiritual condition of
wisdom, values and standard acquired from a complementary relationship between intellect and
emotion preserved in artistic tradition and sustained by reader’s response. In the 1921 essay “The
Possibilities of a Poetic Drama” he had praised the Elizabethan Age for being traditional and tasteful.
Then he had said

“To create a form ( of art) is not merely to invent a shape, a rhyme or rhythm. It is also the realization of the
whole appropriate content of this rhyme or rhythm. The sonnet of Shakespeare is not merely such and such
pattern, but a precise way of thinking and feeling. The framework which was provided by the Elizabethan
dramatist was not merely blank verse and the five act play and the Elizabethan playhouse; it was not merely the
plot – for the poets incorporated, adapted, or invented, as occasion suggested. It was also the half formed..
‘temper of the age’, a preparedness, a habit on the part of the public, to respond to particular stimuli”. (SW,64)

The arrival of genius is not very important for Eliot. For him genius would imply a single, highly
developed consciousness and the very distance between such a consciousness and other contemporary
artists and especially the reader of the time will render him an exception. It is probable that genius
may develop into whimsical and libertine attitude because of the absence of relativity. Eliot’s belief in
comparison and analysis is so fundamental that the issue of relativity is demanding. In “What is a
Classic?” (1944) the two characteristics he adds to the already established character of ‘taste’ are
expansive relativity and comprehensiveness of common style. About relativity he says that the
maturity of mind that qualifies an artist to be classical is not only about being an extension of wisdom
of a collective consciousness informed by ‘fact’ of experience and ‘right’ rendition, it is at the same
time referential of developed tradition beyond the national boundaries. Eliot states

“There must be knowledge of the history of at least one other highly civilized people, and of a people whose
civilization is highly cognate to have influenced and entered our own. This is a consciousness which the
Romans had, and which the Greeks,...could not possess.” (OPP, 61)

The mature sensibility will find full expression if it is able to fulfil all the potential of the language it
uses. Eliot suggests that language being the vehicle of feelings of the collective civilized
consciousness must be so realized and used by the artist to attain a sense of comprehensiveness. It
must be able to sustain the sense of ‘fact’ and the sense of ‘right’ so as to reach out to all minds
existing in a sense of preparedness as the Elizabethans did when receiving the poetic drama. Once a
classic is written like Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin the language has no further potential, and becomes
exhausted and dead. It is worth quoting Eliot in “What is a Classic?” on this point.

“The classic must, within its formal limitations, express the maximum possible of the whole range of feeling
which represents the character of the people who speak that language. It will represent the character of the
people who speak that language. It will represent this at its best, and it will also have the widest appeal: among
the people to which it belongs, it will find its response among all classes and conditions of men”. (OPP, 67)

Eliot rests his argument on the classic by saying that the arrival of a classical work marks the highest
point of maturity and therefore exhaustion of the reach of cognition and its expression. That is to say
within the limit of a growing civilization attainment of maturity corresponds to the cessation of
growth. There is no more possibility to add on to the sense of ‘fact’ and the sense of ‘right’ using the
tools of comparison and analysis and tapping the resources of the language. The point of maturity is
not to be confused with an ideal state of total knowing. We recall with reference to Eliot’s reading of
philosophy that the Absolute of Bradley with heavy indebtedness to the Platonic Ideal was not
acceptable to the sceptical and vigilant approach integral to belief in Eliot. In a way the arrival of a
classic being a stoppage to quest is at once a blessing and, if not a curse, a regret for Eliot.
Shakespeare and Milton not being rated as classical in the sense of Virgil, were poets with classical
potential; their achievements did not exhaust ‘tradition’ and the language and “Shakespeare and
Milton, as later history shows, left open many possibilities of other uses of English in poetry:
whereas, after Virgil, it is truer to say that no great development was possible, until the Latin language
became something different”.(OPP.64)