Lamp and the Lute

Studies in Seven Authors

Bonamy Dobree

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136998850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias

This is the second edition of a collection of critical analysis essays and lectures initially published in 1964 looking at the literary works of Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Hardy, EM. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling, T.S. Eliot and the Alexandrian series of Lawrence Durrell.

T. S. ELIOT¹

IN selecting a contemporary poet for my subject, I have been guided by much the same considerations as led me in choosing contemporary novelists. I have ruled out the older modern writers, distinguished as at least three of the late Victorians are, and two of them still actively writing, because they express attitudes towards life which are not of this time. For another reason—frankly because I do not think them of much value, in spite of a deal of charm—I have passed by those who made their name in immediately pre-war days, namely the ‘Georgian Poets’; they walk in the path of an older poetic faith; the landscape around them has altered, and they have not noticed the change. I have excluded Mr. Yeats and Mr. De la Mare because they are poets of escape into a fairy world and a dream world,² and I wished to hit upon somebody who represents the tangled aspects of our day. Remain the Sitwells, and Mr. Robert Graves. Miss Edith Sitwell appears to me to have developed a technique beyond her thought, to go too far in the direction of poetry meant only for the ear. Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell, a most seductive poet, seems to let too much slip through his fingers, carried away by a very gracious poetic talent which includes a sweetness equal to Marvell’s. In fact Mr. Graves, to my mind, is the only serious competitor. Both as a poet and a critic he represents our time—and a good poet does profoundly represent his time, the stress being on the word profoundly. Mr. Graves attacks gaily from all sorts of unexpected angles. But he has, to my thinking, made the wrong choice of two choices possible at the present day, whereas Mr. Eliot has made the right one. The choices I mean concern the background of thought and poetry essential to every age. The Greeks had their Pantheon and Fate; Dante St. Thomas and the whole corpus of scholastic writing; the seventeenth-century poets were confused, but they had a background of surging life. Now, with the collapse of dogmatic Christianity, where is this background to be found? There is no accepted faith, no agreed politic, or even morality; all is at sixes and sevens; but there are the two new sciences which are doing much to alter our outlook upon the world; the new psychology of Freud, Jung, and such-like, which Mr. Graves has chosen; and anthropology, especially as regards the basis of the older religions, which Mr. Eliot has taken for his province. That is to say, Mr. Graves breaks with tradition,¹ Mr. Eliot enters still further into it.

For Mr. Eliot is a traditional poet, not in any bad way of passive imitation, but in the way which he himself has taken the trouble to define when speaking of other poets. That is, he has the historical sense, ‘which is’, he says, ‘a sense of the timeless and of the temporal together’. A poet of tradition is intensely aware of all that has gone before; he feels that he is adding something to a great structure of poetry, and that if he adds anything, what he adds will slightly change the aspect of all that has already been done. The sense of tradition, Mr. Eliot adds, ‘is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, his contemporaneity’.

To follow a track discovered and already trodden by Mr. Aldington, we may say that Mr. Eliot is the child of two currents of poetic attitude, streams which always flow, though they may sometimes disappear from the landscape of a period. He is the child on the one hand of the poète contumace, tracing his descent through Laforgue, Corbière, and such-like, to Skelton and Villon. The contumacious poet is one who finds himself ill at ease in life, unable to accept current valuations, urged to mock, to flout, to outrage; he is hurt by life; he will harden, but cannot rot into cynicism. Such an attitude is by no means necessarily a shallow one; the disturbance may be very profound, but it can hardly by itself make a great poet, though it may make one who bears much fruit in his successors. There must be another quality, and Villon had such, not easily definable, a largeness of vision Corbière certainly had not. Laforgue had the exquisite wistfulness which often marks the consumptive, a Heine, or a Novalis. Mr. Eliot was at one time easily comparable with Laforgue; not because he imitated him—Mr. Eliot does not imitate—but, though he never exhibited his inherent weaknesses, he had reached much the same mental position as Laforgue. He did not stay there, he could not have stayed there—perhaps Laforgue could not have stayed there had he lived—and then his second line of descent, one through the metaphysical poets back to Dante, made itself felt.

But before proceeding to this latter, let us take one or two instances of Mr. Eliot as the contumacious poet. One characteristic of this order of writers is that they will not be bound by any accepted doctrine of poetry; they insist that they may use whatever material they like, whatever diction. They know that it is no good using the old counters. They are witty poets who shock and startle, not from any desire to do so, but from sheer sincerity. As well as any other poem of Mr. Eliot’s, we may take The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock. It begins in a starkly ‘modernist’ manner:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells.…

That is deliberately rasping, at any rate in the images it suggests, but we soon pass to phrases that are more likely to be accepted as ‘poetic’:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes.

and we are at once confident that we are in the presence of an original poet, for we have met the creative metaphor; and metaphor, as Aristotle insisted, is the one thing that cannot be learnt or imitated. Then, as we enter into the poem, a number of changing rhythms begets in us a sense of futility, and we learn that Prufrock is a middle-aged man trying to screw up his courage to propose, but not daring to ‘disturb the universe’, as he feels, the ordered accustomed sequence of tea-cups, coffee-spoons, and the so-called cultured babble of the drawing-room. In despair Prufrock realizes:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas;

an Elizabethan image that, reminiscent of Donne or Webster, surprising, biting, and unforgettable; unforgettable as Donne’s

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone;

or Webster’s

A dead man’s skull beneath the roots of flowers,

both of which lines Mr. Eliot himself has quoted on occasion. So the poem goes on, with Prufrock ruefully analysing his indecision, facing his inadequacy. And then, at the very end, in a manner favourite with Mr. Eliot, the particular is suddenly made general, the minute emotion caught up and embodied in a larger sphere, by a violent contrast between the ugly and inane on the one hand, and the beautiful—let us use the cant word—charged with meaning on the other. But they are unified; they are different aspects of the same thing:

I grow old … I grow old.…

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed in seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

There is no need to draw attention to the poetic mastery of those lines, the subtle rhythms, the play of vowel-sounds, the vividness of the imagery; they may be noted once for all as qualities ever present in Mr. Eliot’s poetry.

Before leaving Mr. Eliot as the contumacious poet, there is another side of his work which needs stressing, and that is the quality of wit which he, among others, is re-introducing into English poetry; a quality which connects him with the contumacious poets, such as Baudelaire and Catullus on the one hand, and with the metaphysical poets such as Marvell and Donne on the other. And by wit I do not mean the light, trivial thing we now usually mean by the word, but almost, as Mr. Eliot himself suggests, what Coleridge meant by imagination, ‘the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities; of sameness with difference; of the general with the concrete … judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement’. Mr. Eliot develops this. Wit is not erudition, though it belongs to a developed mind. ‘It is not cynicism, though it has a kind of toughness which may be confused with cynicism by the tender-minded … it implies a constant inspection and criticism of experience.… It involves, probably, a recognition implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience.’ He sums it up as a ‘tough reasonableness’. To illustrate this side, one might choose the first part of a poem called Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service, which he heads with a quotation from Marlowe’s Jew of Malta: ‘Look, look, master, here come two religious caterpillars.’ In this poem he is contrasting, and we shall meet the contrast again with him, the intensity of religious feeling in the past with its dogmatic death now; and the reality, the concentration of thought and emotion in bygone ages with their superficiality at the present day. He begins with an old joke as to the fecundity of parsons, expressed in one portentous word which occupies the whole of the first line:

Polyphiloprogenitive

The sapient sutlers of the Lord

Drift across the window-panes.

In the beginning was the Word.

In the beginning was the Word

Superfetation of το ἔυ,

And at the mensual turn of time

Produced enervate Origen.

A painter of the Umbrian school

Designed upon a gesso ground

The nimbus of the Baptized God.

The wilderness is cracked and browned.

But through the water pale and thin

Still shine the unoffending feet,

And there above the painter set

The Father and the Paraclete.

It is different in matter and form from Marvell’s

The grave ’s a fine and private place

But none I think do there embrace;

it is different also from the poem in which Donne makes an unselective flea serve as an argument for love, but the same qualities are there; the connexion of apparently dissimilar things, and the implication of other experiences.

I have been led insensibly into tracing Mr. Eliot’s other line of descent, that from the metaphysical poets, by accentuating one aspect of the contumacious poet, for it is one of Mr. Eliot’s virtues that he fuses so much. Let us see him for one moment as a metaphysical poet pure and simple, one to whom thought is emotion, an experience modifying the sensibility, as he himself says of Donne; for he hopes for, indeed in some respects exemplifies, a return to the seventeenth century, before the dissociation of man into ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION
• PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
• Introduction
• Henrik Ibsen
• Thomas Hardy
• Rudyard Kipling
• E. M. Forster
• D. H. Lawrence
• T. S. Eliot
• On Two Plays by T. S. Eliot
• Lawrence Durrell: the Alexandrian Series