:: T. S. Eliot’s essays and Victorian Poetry ::

First a reflection on last class—what kind of aesthetic model would it take to honor what Wordsworth does with language while finessing the issue of belief? I think the model would have something to do with replacing questions of truth by questions about the deployment and activation of imaginative energies and an appreciation of how resources are mobilized to integrate those energies.

The best way to organize the readings for today is to ask if we can see how the Victorian poems assigned may help explain why Eliot felt he needed ideas like the impersonality of the poet, the objective correlative, the difference between feeling and emotion, and the dissociation of sensibility. Let us start by attempting to be clear on what he thought; then we can turn to the Victorian poetry to establish why these thoughts seemed necessary for founding a new, distinctively modern poetics.

1) An ideal of Impersonality only makes sense when set against something problematic in our ways of cultivating personality—what might that be?

a) Start with 11-12. Why might this be true. Is there any sense in which personality might be a substitute for intelligence or honesty—a setting of charm and entitlement against analysis? b) And what aspects of intelligence are likely to be suppressed by a cult of personality? For Eliot I think there are two. Personality tends to bring with it a notion of origins very different from the way that belief in tradition handles originality, since the latter is always aware of dependency and deference as both a problem and basis forvirtue. More important, when personality is treated as basic, then poetry seems an expression of individual emotions. We lose as the distinguishing feature of poetry not the emotion per se but the synthetic work intelligence does and the forms of intensity that come from intelligence rather than directly from emotion’s eagerness for grandeur (8). And we lose the distinction between feeling and emotion—8. The core of this distinction I think is between what seems to organize the world in terms of plots and persons and what seems to dynamize the world in terms of sensations and the kinds of connections that depend on quick leaps of attention and adjustment to situations rather than to self-projections and expressions—243 speaks of “heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet’s mind.” Above all Eliot’s poetic is anti-expressive, or, perhaps better, believes in expression as a function of intelligence under pressure rather than as a function of personality in pursuit of eloquence.

2) How might the limitations of Hamlet be limitations of expressive personality or consequences of Shakespeare’s amazing ability to embody modernity before anyone knew it existed? Where other Shakespeare plays find formulas for particular emotions, and hence become objective correlatives (124-5), Hamlet occupies a problematic border between art and symptomatic expressivism (expression of is both subjective and objective genitive). This border for Eliot is unbearable--it is also the border between civility and psychosis. Where the objective correlative cannot be found there is only being mastered by the psyche’s absorption in what it cannot handle. And then expression in both art and in life becomes a kind of substitute for the real that constantly defers what it claims to disclose. (What might Eliot say to the question how he can know this about Hamlet if Shakespeare failed to make the work an objective correlative for just such emotional states? Could he just grant the point or would he need a different poetics?)

For a great example of objective correlative and the psychology probably connected to it think of the Hass prose poem on lady with breast cancer who leaves basket of dead bees on door of man who refused her offer to be lovers.

3) Can one use examples like Hamlet to make the case that there is a dissociation of sensibility that is deeply problematic for Western culture since the emergence of protestant power? For Eliot this notion is very powerful because it does three things at once. a) It explains what has gone wrong with poetry since Milton, especially what has gone wrong that leads to such dichotomies as that between Dryden and Milton or Arnold and Wordsworth, or perhaps within a poet like Tennyson who shifted from public poetry like Idylls of King and In Memoriam to pure, almost drug hallucinatory lyrics like Lotus-Eaters. b) It shows how poetry exemplifies the problems of a culture that is constantly torn between overanalysis and reliance on sensibility (248). When Eliot talks about a good humanism as not a concept at all but a deep civility, he is really trying to think outside the inherited binaries. c) He can envision the intelligence it required for poetry to take on a distinctive social role. Poetry must be difficult because it must set its form of intelligence against the kinds of synthesis that rely on either analysis or sentiment. It must honor the ways feelings can be thought and thoughts directly felt--248. Can we make sense of this when we turn to his poetry—we will see what he means by “transmuting ideas into sensations,” and “transforming a thought into a state of mind” (249). Notice also how important the ideal of intensity is for Eliot, as it was for Pater. But in Eliot the intensity is not quite a condition of experience that gets into art but it is a product of how the intelligence works within the work of art.

4) Uses of ideal of tradition: a) provide a version of content that stresses poet as craftsperson and maker rather than expressor and psuedo-philosopher. b) So defining the poet allows for a clear professionalization and sense of responsibility more abstract than any particular historical commitments (so, lacking historical commitments, the writer might still have values to honor).

 

To deepen our sense of Eliot the critic (and the poet) I want to ask what might Eliot say about the following poems? 1) Look first at the opening of Arnold’s fifth marguerite poem. How might the initial direction of sensation clarify what is distinctive and painful about being Arnold? Why the "yes," then the statement of isolation. He is talking primarily to himself, and he has to imagine such talking and justifying before he can enter feeling. Feeling seems condemned to confirming what he thinks or wants to think. (Ending of poem is great, and modern.) 2) The fourth "Marguerite" poem is even more painful if we concentrate on what the speaker is trying to accomplish and let ourselves pursue some clues that he is not exactly in control of his reflections. a) Notice first the psychological economy of the opening. What is the dominant sensation? His emphasis is on the sensation of the effort at self-command. And, worse, the self command is recalled from the past, so that the memory of self-command seems involuntarily to be oppressive. How can the poem reconcile the desire to be in command with the fact of the failure of that command and the haunting return of that sense of failure? b) One more small detail opens the need to read this poem in a particular way. To whom do you expect the “thou” to refer in the opening of the third stanza? And to whom does it refer? And why is the reference part of a syntactically intricate imperative? And why does the imperative “back” have to be repeated in a way that leads to a digression, a digression where we see the first signs of any sensations not caught up in his discursive mind.

These questions lead me to propose that we have to read this poem on two distinctive levels, then try to integrate them--a) how he presents to himself an understanding of why the romance fails, and b) what he does not see about his use of that staging to justify his aloneness, and hence to deepen it. Yet while the ignorance is foregrounded I do not think the poem is ironic, 1) Basis of the second aspect of my reading is how hard he works to make himself distinctive in his realization of the loneliness so that he is somehow a heroic knower even as he is a sexual loser. After recognizing the strangeness of the speaking in stanza one, I think we have to ask what happens to I and "we" and present and future that makes stanzas 2 and 3 so different from Wordsworth? Solitude and repetition prove inseparable. Analogously it is crucial to see what happens to Wordsworth's nature in stanza 6—nature matters here not because we share its basic forces but because it is world of unmating things. 2) Why not end the poem at end of stanza 5? Part of one's answer to that has to include what we can see here as one of the dominant rhetorical habits of the poem--the gesture of repetition in the service of a not quite yet--first the farewell's, the "back," then "if not quite alone," and then "happier men." Why all this refusal to end? Here we begin to open into another reading about the deep needs that the poet's conscious efforts are trying to resolve. Is he most concerned with understanding loneliness or with remythologizing himself in order to remain heroic even when he has been dumped?

3) This sense of the poem as substitute or supplement doing a kind of work it cannot acknowledge is important in itself psychologically. But it may be even more important culturally as an illustration of the limitations of self-consciousness when there is dissociation of sensibility. Perhaps the more we try to interpret our individual conditions the more we end up just acting out needs of which we are not aware. Perhaps self-consciousness is not a very good way to get to truth because the instrument is not transparent. It is in fact colored by exactly what it claims to see clearly and without distorting influences. It wants to express the self in its neediness without acknowledging how that neediness might influence the process. So the more we talk about need, or the more a culture has individuals trying to deal with need by talking about themselves, the more are we are likely to think that the need goes deeper than the talk. And the talk becomes a symptom rather than a cure. It becomes less strange and inhuman to idealize impersonality and escaping the subject. 4) Now go back to the strange central stanza in the poem--why is this here? Consciously or unconsciously, Arnold seems compelled to let into the poem a level of sensation that drives the self-consciousness but is not available to it in anything like its fullness. What is the sense of shame really about? Arnold renders it as a shame analogous to the god’s letting what is divine be seduced by the human. But along what felt lines does he identify with that divine analogue, especially since the relevant goddess is a woman. Is his shame that he let reason degrade itself? What kind of reason is it that defends radical loneliness? Or is his shame that he now has to undergo such degrading efforts to shore himself up. Perhaps he needs this sense of shame to address his own feelings of failed masculinity.

The important matter is how an indefinable and ungraspable emotion seems to arise at the very core of the poem. There something emerges that links to the god, but in the form of shame. The shame takes the place of Wordsworth's "I have felt" that he can name and grasp dialectically. And the rhetoric of knowledge and lucidity cannot overcome shame and doubt, as the work with negation does in Wordsworth. Rather the rhetoric of knowledge turns out to be a mask pursued in order to avoid his own defensiveness. His positive claims about loneliness are in fact required by his own inability to get beyond self-consciousness, so he creates, and even tries to dignify the very source of his pain without ever actually confronting it. NO wonder then that when he tries to locate a self it is always in some form of buried currents, as in the short poem above “Longing” on your handout. This buried life justifes an expressivist poetic, but its failures conversely justify trying alternatives to that poetic. (Later I will talk about objective expressivism replacing subjective expressivism.)

It is crucial to see that Tennyson is in many respects Arnold’s opposite, yet seems condemned to the same practice of using consciousness as denial of the actual condition. Consider for example what happens when Tennyson tries to produce a noble public image, as he often tried to do. Do you see what is strange about the ending of "Ulysses"? Why are all the verbs intransitive? What does that tell us about the limits of this way of linking the imagination of role with the affirmation of a public order. Can you see why Eliot may think then that humanism is hopeless as thought so something like faith may be necessary?

In some respects Tennyson as poet is humanly preferable to Arnold because at least half his work begins as always already defeated in the public order so that it has to seek some kind of purely private and largely sensual alternative. And that means also rejecting Arnoldian discursiveness for a poetry that has no truck at all with ideas or with efforts at moral responsibility or projections into the male dignity role as a means of lyric sensibility. This part of Tennyson then generates Swinburne and much of late nineteenth century sensibility. (Eliot has an interesting essay on Swinburne.) For examples of this Tennyson I suggest you look at his dramatic monologues that in fact deny any drama or possible active interaction with their audience—“Tithonus and “Lotus Eaters,” or his pure lyrics like “Marianna” and “Lady of shalott. Here it seems as if his deep identification can be with what becomes lyrical in obsession and madness. (One thinks of Eliot on those who have too much personality.) “Lotos Eaters” attempts a masculine version of such pain, where the weariness becomes the basis for arguments that build to climax in 6th stanza when they imagine their version of a future that they then surrender for an eternal present. In the place where public argument is called for Tennyson gives only the elaboration of mood, and for the I he gives only an abstracted collective. Similarly, Tithonus turns to an individual male figure, but one always already impotent since he cannot even die. So where Arnold tries to develop at least a lucid I, Tennyson as lyric poet presents the I as something radically other to any kind of reasoning. Tennyson can't quite do the stoic, so he needs more melodramatic lyrical poses to get his "I"'s into intense self-expression. Perhaps the female carries male activity and the male is entirely passive, but in that passivity he can have an expressivity entirely lacking to the businessman male. The female is heart's scholar gypsy, and her place in poetry (perhaps like Arnold’s Luna) is mostly in the space that intricate formal pattern establishes.

Finally I want to call you attention to the poetry of Wilde because it tries to give a body to Paterian values and show how a life of intense sensation might be satisfying. Even with Pater it is crucial that there are two registers of sensation—a liveliness or vivacity or enargeia for particulars and an intricacy and relational harmonics to our senses of conjunction and dynamic opposition. And the emphasis on fluidity and momentary integration makes his perspective shaprly opposed to all forms of ideality, especially to habit—222 links the need for relational principle to hatred of habit. For Pater this sense of bringing focus to sensation forces us back on the intense but tragic isolation of the self (221), the domain where ideality breaks down and the full fluidity of sensation emerges. Activity and passivity become strangely allied, so that for Pater the key term for human agency is not character or person but “temperament,” a great term that contains almost all of what is distinctive to late 19^th century values. (It helps to keep this in the background for Eliot because he begins with the same sense of being locked into chamber of sensations, but eventually seeks a quite different margin of ideality and common sense—not in the self but in something like “myth,” then “soul,” that opens on to collective possibilities for bringing felt order to sensations.)

On Wilde I want to stress two aspects of the poetry (aspects that carry also into his plays and novel). 1) How the idea of romance moves out of nature and out of medieval historicizing into something like the fullness of a sense of active psyche that art can provide. How do you read the tone of his “Helas” and its lament for losing a soul’s inheritance in exchange for a touch of the honey of romance? I see it as the thrill of transgressing a boundary, not unlinked to his sexual choice. But the important thing is what carries that romance—soul becomes no different from sense as stringed lute. I stress this because I think the best way to look at the aestheticist impulse in modernism is to link it with romance values but to see all the romance being explicitly in qualities of auto-affection set somewhat free from the demands of history and of morality. 2) But it also matters to see the limitations within poetry of Wildean ambitions. It is very interesting to compare the first three stanzas of his “Impression du Matin” to Wordworth’s sonnet on London waking up in the morning. In Wilde it is the moment that matters and not the sense of linked natural and social force exemplified in the moment. But why does he need the last stanza? What is the relation of her metaphoric physicality to that of the city? Is the play of sensation not enough, so that some form of idealization, even fantasy, seems a necessary supplement. How might something like sensation be sufficient for lyric satisfaction?