Masud Mahmood
I ABSTRACT : Traditional criticism is in the habit of viewing T.S. Eliot as a tough classicist and a brassbound enemy of the Romantic literary mode, But a close examination of Eliot's idea of the creative process reveals his strong romantic propensities. Over time he shifted his ground from hard classical objectivity to an extremely personal kind of romantic subjectivity -from a mechanistic view of creative process to an organicistic one. Creation is for him a compulsive act of an intense romantic nature minus the grace of romantic joy, quite often even resembling something of a pathological release.11
T.S. Eliot appears to have thought it rather strange that a poet should leave no account of his creative experience. He reproaches Matthew Arnold as an equally dull academic poet and critic, because
... he is so little concerned with poetry from the makes point of view. One feels that the writing of poetry brought him little of that excitement, that joyful loss of self in the workmanship of art, that intense transitory relief which comes at the moment of completion and is the chief reward of creative work. [ Idiot, 1964b : 108 ]
As always, Eliot may be a bit too hard on
The poet's account of his creative experience is valuable, not because it explains his work any better - in fact, it is more likely to delude the reader than help him that way2 - but because, apart from holding a unique interest of its own, the account reveals the work in the making, the work during its "long process of gestation" [ Eliot, 1986 : 100 ]. The interest is extra-literary, to be sure, for a poem- as soon as it is made - becomes autonomous and inexplicable otherwise than in its own terms. It starts to exist "somewhere between the writer and the reader; it has a reality which is not simply the reality of what the writer is trying to 'express', or of his experience of writing it, or of the experience of the reader or of the writer as reader. Consequently, the problem of what a poem 'means' is a good deal more difficult than it at first appears". [ Eliot, 1964b : 30 and also 1969 : X]. Poetry, then, communicates little else than artistic experience generated by its verbal structure, perhaps "formed out of many personal experiences ordered in some way which may be very different from the way of valuation of practical life ..:" [ Eliot, 1964b : 30], in which case it is not much help calling in the poet to clear up the meaning of his poem. Eliot points to two reasons for which the poet's aid is useless: firstly, what he can talk about with authority falls outside the scope of the poem's objective reality (for "What the poet experienced is not poetry but poetic material ..." [ Eliot, 1964b : 126 ]); and secondly, it is beyond him to explain something used in the poem 'upon instinct'. The poem is out there - sovereign and objective, meaning "as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed in the course of time a poet may become merely a reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning - or without forgetting, merely changing" I Eliot, 1964b : 129-130 ]. Eliot finds a finished poem being read by the reader actually at a third remove from the original poetic material that the poet experienced. The second stage of writing it is, in fact, the creative stage (" a fresh 'experience' " for the poet quite different from experiencing the poetic material) - the stage in which the transformation of the material into the poem takes place [ Eliot 1964b : 126 ]. Being the transformative stage, it is the most crucial of the three stages Eliot mentions, for it is here that the distance between the poetic material and the poem is created. Angus Calder also points out that the poet finds communication problematic, because the strugglesome act of communication itself changes the poet's original ideas, if not feelings, into something else.3 Communication creates the play of meanings in the poem, rendering the poet's original ideas liable to endless interpretation and thereby exposing them to high interpretative insecurity. It is all the more so in poetry because of the connotative nature of poetic language. Calder argues that a poem goes out of its author's control as soon as it gets on to a page for the reader's eye [ Calder, 1987 : 21 ].
Interpretation, then, is a potential creative process - it is thereader's. His own personal situation in life and his past readings must affect his current experience of reading a poem ; so that there are as many meanings of the poem as there may be readers, as it were, and therefore, the poem can never practically get out of the flux of an interminable creative process and settle down. And hence it has "always before it ... an endless adventure" [Eliot, 1986 : 38 ] . Eliot, too, is aware that a poem is in a perpetually fluid state in its wandering from reader to reader, as "our individual taste in poetry bears the indelible traces of our individual lives with all their experience pleasurable and painful" [Eliot, 1964b : 141 ]. In the course of its progress, it acquires different patterns in different minds, owing to what Eliot calls "personal saturation" [Eliot, 1964b: 147]. So, a poem may not mean "as much what it means to others as what it means to the author", as he maintains elsewhere [ Eliot, 1964b : 129-130 ].
A poem, viewed as thus far removed from its origin, can have but little to do with an account of its creative process in the way of critical interpretation. Despite his great acclaim of Livingstone Lowes's The Road to Xanadu ("... One book like this is enough" [ Eliot, 1986 :108]), Eliot disapproves of its "rather bad influence on English criticism", because it perpetuates the Romantic critical mode of "explanation by origins" [ Eliot, 1986 : 107 ]. The real merit of the book, however, - for Eliot - lies in its successful demonstration of the mysterious mechanism of digestion and transformation of material into art by a poetic genius. But this curiosity looks "beyond the frontier of literary criticism" [Eliot, 1986: 108]. The poet's "honest" account of this creative experience may be "illuminating" in two ways, according to Eliot: firstly, it may afford useful insight into the operational mode of his creative mind; and secondly, his account may yield a limited meaning of his poems connected with their history of composition and material [ Elot, 1964b : 130 and 138 ]. One utility of such an account, then, is that it can help measure the creative displacement of the original poetic materials upto their final shape.
Eliot's first major theoretical statement about the creative process is made in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' as part of his Impersonal theory of poetry. Although described - with an apparent touch of regret "as perhaps the most juvenile" [ Eliot, 1964b : 9 ] by Eliot, it has come to stay and enjoyed enormous popularity ever since its publication in 1917. lie draws upon a rather tricky chemical analogy to illustrate the intricate way in which he thinks the creative process ought to work [ Eliot, 1950 : 7-8 ]. The hub of this theory is Eliot's idea of an inert poetic mind being ideally conducive to poetic composition : it is likened to "a bit of finely filiated platinum" and assigned to play an inert, neutral and causative role, just as platinum does as a catalyst to bring about the reaction between sulphur and oxygen to produce the chemical compound of sulphurous acid. Eliot's chemistry of poetic creation can, however, tackle experiences4 only when they arc processed into purely impersonal emotions and feelings. These ingredients, under mental pressure and concentration, combine and get transformed into a new poetic compound- "structural emotion", as Eliot would like to call it [ Eliot, 1950 : 10 ]. It may be "formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several ... " [ Eliot, 1950 : 8 ]. The poet's catalyst-mind creates causative induction by its presence, and thus it is indispensable like the platinum in the chemical process. Like the latter, too, it does not participate as one of the ingredients in the process nor does it lend its physical properties to the endproduct. The mind itself remains hard and unaffected. The more depersonalised the poetic mind is, the more "finely perfected" it is as a creative medium, and the more freely can the varied feelings "enter into new combinations" in its presence [ Eliot, 1950 : 7]. The poet's personal taste is allowed only an incidental part in the choice of "objective correlatives" in order to perfect the "structural emotion" in the final composition :"... various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result" [ Eliot, 1950 : 8].
Besides being imaged as a platinum-like hard catalyst, the poet's mind is also conceived in the Impersonal theory as "a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together" I Eliot, -1950 : 8]. Eliot abandons Ills notion of poetic mind as a hard depersonalised medium in his later idea of it, but retains its receptacle-metaphor, though no longer as an inert, inorganic thing but as something vital and active in its own curious way.
Some of Eliot's earlier views on the creative process as enunciated in his Impersonal theory are, however, carried over into his later expositions of poetic process, such as the idea that poetic material slowly gathers over time in the poet's mind like the gradual accumulation of a tantalus jar [ Eliot, 1964a : 16 ] which remains there "in suspension" waiting for "the proper combination" [ Eliot, 1950 : 8]. When the flash-point is reached "unpredictable crystallizations" result (in which feeling and form are in perfect balance), but that happens "only once in five or ten years" when "experience accumulates to form a new whole and finds its appropriate expression".5 Elsewhere Eliot resorts to an organic metaphor to illustrate this "long incubation" of poetic material in the poet's mind and its unpredictable results : he compares It to the time-consuming process of hatching an egg, whose results cannot be known beforehand, because" ... we do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on" [ E1iot, 1964b : 144 ].
Implicitly though, the Impersonal theory acknowledges the relevance of the unconscious in the creative process [ Eliot, 1950 : 10 ] which figures so prominently in his later idea of poetic creation. One reason why the poet has to wait for "unpredictable crystallizations" is that they cannot be willed or wished into being and also that "The development of experience is largely unconscious, subterranean, so that we cannot gauge its progress except once in every five or ten years ..." [ Eliot, 1964a : 16 ]. What seems to make his idea of the unconscious in his Impersonal theory rather faulty is his suggestion that, as well as the conscious, it could also be willed by a good poet. But, later on, he knows better to recognise its principles of autonomous operation; he even goes so far as to suggest an active organic unconscious 6 independent of any external will, which follows its own laws of selection - laws obscure and unknowable. Its subterranean archive of memories is not random but select: " ... the mind of any poet would be magnetised in its own way, to select automatically" [ Eliot, 1964b : 78 ]. (Needless to say that the mind's "own way" is but the poet's temperament.) Eliot admits that memory plays a far greater role in the creative process than can be explained [Eliot, 1964b: 78]. He poses the rhetorical question:
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 or a Gentian mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction where there ,was a watermill : such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer [ Eliot, 19646 : 148 ].
It is a recognition of the Selective nature of the unconscious and its evocative power. It elects to store up some but reject other of the images, perhaps according to the temperament of the poet. The stored up images "might lie dormant in his mind for twenty years" [ Eliot 1964b : 79 ] whereby they acquire a "personal saturation value" [ Eliot 1964b : 147 ] - that is, they become charged with an intensity that did not originally inhere in them. Then, at a creative moment, they start welling up unsolicited into the surface of the poet's consciousness from the depths of the unpeerable unconscious, and "re-appear transformed in some verse-context charged with great imaginative pressure" [ Eliot, 1964b : 79 ]. The images are in one sense 'temperamental', because as Eliot suggests, all images do not have an equal emotive value for everybody; they vary from individual to individual. Eliot - so anxious to erase the poet's personality during his early critical campaign cannot help now the recognition of poetic intensity largely coming from the poet's personality. His gradual acceptance of the importance of subjective and evocative elements in poetry can be measured by the emphasis he increasingly puts on the personal in his critical remarks.
But it might be erroneous to assume that Eliot goes entirely over to the side of the personal and irrational forces in the creative process, as his acquaintance with it deepens over time. He never, throughout his poetic career, compromises the position he holds on this subject in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' - that consciousness and unconsciousness are in perfect balance in good poetic art. He speaks for a poetic process that can assimilate opposites, and is capable of producing poetry held on the tension of opposites. He believes : "Organisation is necessary as well as 'inspiration' " [Eliot, 1964b : 146], and Lowes's Road to Xanadu shows him into the balancing mechanism in Coleridge's creative activity - the balancing of opposites, especially that of consciousness and unconsciousness [Eliot, 1964b : 78]. Stephen Spender shows that consciousness and unconsciousness balance each other in Eliot's poetics. It is unlike Rimbaud's poetics of depersonalization, in which the poet is reduced to the condition of a musical instrument "played upon by external forces of violence and internal psychic ones" [ Spender, 1975 : 149 ].
One of Eliot's chief interests in accounts of creative process is to see how diverse, and discordant elements are fused into a new whole in the course of a poetic process. His own effort is also directed towards the exploration of the nature of this synthetic tendency of the process. He shows his aptitude for it even as early as the Impersonal theory: the arm of perfecting the poetic medium by depersonalisation is to obtain a new poetic compound of the synthetic nature of a new chemical whole as contrasted with a mechanical mixture. The Impersonal theory starts Eliot off on a quest for an understanding and conceptualization of the nature of the poetic process of unified sensibility as exemplified by the classical masters like Dante and Racin, Elizabethan dramatists, the 17th-Century Metaphysical school of John Donne, Coleridge, Baudelaire, Laforgue and Corbière.. It is a sensibility which can " devour any kind of experience" [ Eliot, 1950 : 247 ], smooth out disparateness and resolve the contradiction of the "chaotic, irregular, fragmentary" [ Eliot, 1950 : 247] in process of final into-ration. It is the true mark of poetic originality, which is, for Eliot, "largely an original way of assembling the most disparate and unlikely material to make a new whole" [ Eliot, 1986 : 108 ], as he finds demonstrated by the genius of Coleridge. It should be observed here that the creative mode of unified sensibility is, in essence, akin to that of %A -hat Coleridge calls esemplastic power which "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate. .." [ Coleridge, 1967 : Vol. I, 202 ]. Like the unified sensibility, too, it is "synthetic", "reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities," and aims to achieve a unity out of diversity. [ Coleridge, 1967, Vol. II, 12 ]. In fact, both define the same imagination at its creative best. What is remark-able, besides, is Coleridge's recognition of the co-existence of conscious will and imagination in the creative act, [ Coleridge, 1967 : Vol. I, 202 ], which may have caught Eliot's attention too.
Yet there is an important difference between their concepts of poetic process. Although Coleridge's concept speaks of blending and harmonizing of opposites, it hardly tells anything about the transmutation of poetic material, which constitutes the vital part of the poetic process, for Eliot, because the artistic material derives its intensity and wholeness from this very process of transmutation [ Eliot, 1950 : 8]. In tile process, the original incidence of stimulation shifts from thought to perception and vice versa. It is this "essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind" that Eliot notices in the creative mode of all his literary masters [ Eliot, 1950 : 249 ].
Rather too pert and overweening, the Impersonal theory is a formulation from Eliot's cavalier days, when lie was under the "influence of Ezra Pound's enthusiasm for Remy de Gourmont" [ Eliot, 1964b : 10 & 1969 : viii ] which presumably gave him the confidence that everything was reducible to scientific explanation. He draws notably on Gourmont's Le Probleme du Style (1902), when he distinguishes the radically non-rational nature of' the poetic process7 and solemnly endeavours to rationalize it with a profusion of scientific metaphors, analogies, diction and illustrations, as if in order to give the formula of' poetic creation a face of scientific objectivity; so that it could work as one single inviolable definition adequate to define and describe all sorts of poetic process. As a perfect poetic medium, the poet's mind is imagined in this theory to have been depersonalised to tile extent of being capable of- art objects that "may be said to reach the condition of science" [ Eliot, 1950 : 7].( 1t is important to note that Eliot's early poetics view a poem as a verbal artefact. ).
It is all very well that tile theory is so much articulate, lucid and neat. But it is really too much so to comprehend the dark, deep, complex workings of the poet's mind engaged iii creation :a single poetic process is assumed, its forces are simplistically sorted out and quantified, and its ingredients arc catagorised. One can see why such a theory can so easily catch on without being still a working formula. Eliot propounds the theory during a period when his battle-cry is "the integrity of poetry" [ Eliot, 1909 : viii] and zealously rushes right on to theorize about a poetic process that call produce, in effect, nothing but a dehumanised art. Once lie complains that lie can see "not so much daemonic possession as the splitting up of personality" in the history of' English poetry [ Eliot, 1964b : 84 ]. But one could as well turn it against him and say that ironically 'Tradition and the Individual Talent, makes one more sad contribution to this history of split poetic personality by encouraging a complete severance between "tile man who suffers and the mind which creates" [ Eliot, 1950 : 8]. Its spirit perfectly corresponds with the ethos of Eliot's schizophrenic poetic world up to The Wasteland. After The Sacred Wood (1920), Eliot seems to be feeling about in the dark and twilight zones of the mind for grasping the nature of "daemonic possession" in the poetic process. When he delivers the Clark Lectures at
I do not believe that any two poets' minds work quite in the same way, so far as we can know enough about the matter for 'working' to mean anything at all; I do not believe that even the same poet's mind need work in the same way in two different poems but equally good poems... [Eliot, 1964b : 83 ]
Hence a poet's own art poetique remains, in the last analysis, a defence of his own practice, of "the way in which he himself writes or wants to write", and of his own kind of poetry [Eliot, 1965 : 33]. It may or may not be relevant to any other kind.
Understandably, this humility results from Eliot's increasing knowledge of the poetic process owing to his life-long preoccupation with it. Now it seems that he takes the line of 'normal human course of development' after completing the curve of technical excellence.8 As a matter of course, scientific metaphors employed in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' to expound the poetic process give way increasingly to organic ones, especially the life-metaphors. As early as 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921) he attempts to explain that the 'Metaphysical' poetic process effects a unification of sensibility by integrating bodily sensations and mental perceptions into organic wholes, (life also being an integration of body and mind).9 Eliot moves on to the Romantic notion of the poet's mind as a living thing capable of creating an organic unity of diverse and discordant elements. It is similar to Coleridge's idea of living imagination defined as "essentially vital"[ Coleridge, 1967 : Vol. I, 202 ]. Apropos of poetic process the life-metaphor becomes particularly explicit in Eliot's 1926 Clark Lectures [ Lobb, 1981 : 129 ]. From The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism onwards, direct or implied life-metaphors--such as germ or creative germ, hatching of an ego, embryo, agony of childbearing, birth of a poem, growth of a form and the like [ see Eliot, 1964b : 56, 144 and 1986 : 37, 97-98,101 et. passim], he finds recurrently helpful in comprehending and elucidating the nature and modus operandi of the poetic process.
At this time Eliot becomes gradually aware of a kind of poetry that evades the poetic process of "the deliberate putting together out of materials at hand." He finds this mechanical poetic art of "devising" rather inadequate to cope with "the sudden irruption of the germ of a new poem" that comes on "merely as a state of feeling" [ Eliot, 1964b : 56 ]. The first palpable symptom of such a poem may also be experienced as "a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words, and ... this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the image ...". [Eliot, 1986 : 38] . Angus Calder shows that images come unsolicited in Eliot's poetry, borne on rhythm, which is the most dominant 'primitive' constituent of his poetic process, causing, as it does, the Ultimate effect in the poetry to be symboliste rather than imagiste [Calder 1987: 116]. Part of the function of Eliot's auditory imagination is to surface in rhythm "the most primitive and forgotten" lying "far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling". It is
... the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word, sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in tile ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilised mentality." [Eliot, 1964b: 118-119]
There is not much in life for Eliot that can be said in poetry or as poetry, though it may be in verse. But, for that matter, prose is a better medium as a vehicle of meaning, as Eliot suggests. ("... for us, anything that can be said as well in prose can be better said in prose", for "a great deal, in the way of meaning, belongs to prose rather than to poetry" [ Eliot, 1964b : 152 ]). Poetry does not hold, for him, 'meaning' as interpretation but as expression of some obscure impulse from the dim and elusive zone of consciousness which refuses to yield to the rational and expository raids of 'prose. The auditory imagination, as defined above, suggests a poetic process which appears to be able to tap "tile deeper, unnamed feelings which", along with the deposit of self-evasion, "form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate ..." [ Eliot, 1964b : 155 ].This is the use of poetry for Eliot, and indicates the direction of his poetic process. His most notable achievement in the formulation of auditory imagination is the conceptualization of a poetic process which combines Eliot's early preoccupation with amalgamating the discordant and disparate ( as demonstrated by the unified sensibility ) and his later one with the primitive and magical in verse.
The most agonizing and exasperating of all poetic processes is, for Eliot, that of poetry of the first voice, which grows out of the poet's struggle to give expression to obscure impulse faintly transmitted from "the substratum of our being."10 It is so, because there is nothing given, except an inner urge of great urgency to say something. To begin with, the poet experiences it as an obscure "inert embryo or 'creative germ' " ("Crying with frog voice, 'what shall I be ?"' in the gloom of the mind), whose demands are at once unidentifiable and inexorable. It goes on gnawing about in his heart until he can find it "the right words in tile right order." Since he does not know what he will find words for, he must go by a trial-and-error method. The agony will not be over "until he has said it" and said it exactly. The compulsion of saying it is so strong and painful that the poet is least mindful at the moment of either his audience or his craftsmanship. ("The poetry does not matter", as Eliot says in East Coker, 1.72.). His immediate need is to "obtain relief' from this oppression by bringing to birth what is struggling to be born. It is likened to an almost implacable demonic possession which refuses to be exorcised except by being 'written off [ Eliot, 1986 : 97-98 ]. Until the birth of the poem the poet does not know whether the "dark psychic material" he has been wrestling with is "the octopus or angel" [Eliot, 1986 : 100 ]. Even after tile birth the identity of the embryonic material remains as unknowable as ever and a subject for the 'deep-seeing' psychoanalyst's endless speculation, because, by now, it "has disappeared, replaced" by the poem [ Eliot, 1986 : 98 ]. In this act of creation, the poet's suffering might as well be said to be verging on romantic agony, and his lot is similar to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner's, who must tell his tale to obtain relief. Or it might be compared with Prufrock's baffled but obstinate efforts to articulate and verbalise his deep-lying obscure impulse of "what I mean". The struggle of bringing it to light by playing around (with more emphasis on failure than success rather in the Sisyphean vein) is, in fact, a model poetic strategy for Eliot in dealing with lyric impulses of an elusive nature, which slip the grasp of 'demotic' language. Hence every confrontation with the inchoate impulse calls for an entirely novel attempt at expression. To have to write in this mode is to be painfully aware of tile limits of language and to be continually pushing at its frontier, as Eliot sums it up in East Coker
..- every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.
(ll. 178-186)
On the other hand, the creative experience of the poetic process of second- and third-voice poetry is much more bearable, for "the form is already to some extent given" and the "rude unknown psychic material" is not so bugging as in the process of the first type-- since poetry is incidental there. [ Eliot, 1986 : 80 ]
Although strong suggestions of demonic possession and romantic agony attend Eliot's later ideas of poetic composition, he does not, however, believe that a poem is "a present from a friendly or impertinent demon." He doubts the credibility of mystical trances or inspiration as an aid in poetic creation [ Eliot, 1964b : 144 ], perhaps because the creative process, for him, is not accompanied by ecstasy and exaltation owing to "a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," as with the Romantics. It is rather a "frightful" criticocreative toil of "sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing."11 Hence, his post-creative feeling is one of disgust, of "some obstruction" momentarily removed, of a much-needed relief from "an intolerable burden" or of even convalescence. 12 His own lifelong physical debilities must have had a great deal to do with his idea that "some forms of ill-health, debility or anemia, may ... produce an efllux of poetry ..." [ Eliot, 1964b : 144 ]. Thus it so happened that Eliot's personal life not only affected his later poetry but also his later ideas of poetic process. Each of Eliot's creative acts was of an awfully exhausting nature, not followed up by more productivity, as with - for instance -Yeats and Auden.13 Poetry came to him in bits and pieces rather than in a whole chunk at once [ Huq., 1979 : 244 et passim ]. So, as opposed to the Romantic notion of spontaneous creation, there seems to emerge from Eliot's speculations and the manner of his own practice the idea of a poetic process, which is constrained or even 'constipated' and pathological, maybe slightly touched with the neurosis of "vision and revision". This might as well account for his meagre poetic bulk which once drew Edmund Wilson's scoffing remark you can get through it all in the evenings of a week" [ Wilson, 1965 : 381].
But the thin poetic corpus is beside the point as long as it contains the crystals of his mind and, as has been suggested earlier, Eliot cares for such rare mental crystals in poetry rather than the criticism of life, as
Eliot's idea of creative process appears to have changed in correspondence with the change in his idea of poetry - from the impersonal to the personal. Probably he compared notes, in his “private poetry-workshop” [ Eliot, 1986 : 106 ], with those who had influenced him on, among other things, the nature of creative experience with a view to leaving an acceptable account of the poetic process, which remained his life-long preoccupation. He may have put the results of such workshops to the test of his own practice and revised them from time to time. As a result his idea of it kept changing; so that the evolution of the idea was not so much inconsistency -- as Spender suggests [Spender, 1975: 134] - as revision in the light of his creative experience.
NOTES
1. The first part of the title is taken from William Wordsworth's The Prelude, Bk. iv, line 339. The discussion of the creative process in this paper will be confined to Eliot's idea of poetic process, for he thought it outside of his Competence to talk about any other area but his own.
(Eliot, 1986: 107).
2. Eliot warns: "The attempt to explain the poem by tracing it back to its origins will distract attention from the poem, to direct it on to something else which it can be apprehended by the critic and his readers, has no relation to the poem and throws no light upon it." (1986 :99).
3. Calder, 1987:20. Feelings do not change, according to Calder; but Eliot thinks they do change into "structural emotion" (Eliot, 1950:10 ).
4. Eliot does not bother to define what he means by experience in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', for he is concerned in this phase of his critical opinion with "the problem of the integrity of poetry" (Eliot, 1969:viii). Later on when his perspective widens out he defines it as "The results of reading and reflection, varied interests of all sorts, contacts and acquaintances, as well as passion and adventure". (Eliot, 1964a :17).
5. Eliot, (1964a : 16 ). Issuing as it did from such a slow time-consuming poetic process, the bulk of Eliot's poetical works, one might say, could not have been thicker than it is now.
6. Eliot speaks of "the importance of instinctive and unconscious, as well as deliberate selection"- as if the unconscious is also living and selective. (Eliot, 1964b:78)
7. The use of 'fusion' and 'sensibility' as keywords is common in both. These words speak a great deal about Eliot's idea of creative process in the early phase of his theoretical development.
8. "... a poet's work may proceed along two lines on an imaginary graph ; one of the lines being his conscious and continuous effort in technical excellence, that is, in continually developing his medium for the moment when he really has something to say. The other line is just his normal human course of development, his accumulation and digestion of experience... "(Eliot, 1964a : 17)
9. Lobb (1981:183 n.146) suggests that Eliot's use of the organic metaphor in 'The Function of Criticism' may be the result of his reading of Burke and the Romantics.
10. Eliot (1986 : 89). In poetry of the first voice the poet talks to himself ; in that of the second voice, to an audience, and in that of the third voice, to an audience through a dramatic character.
11. Eliot, 1950 : 18. Conrad Aiken recalls how, during the composition of The Wasteland, Eliot s nights proved illusory and "the sharpened pencil lay unused by the untouched sheet of paper"- Conrad Aiken, "Anatomy of Melancholy", T. S. Eliot: the Man and His Work, (ed.) Allen Tate. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967 : 195)
12. Eliot, 19646 : 145. See also 1986 : 98, where Eliot describes the feeling after completing a poem which is one of "exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation..."
13. Calder (1987: 78). Calder reads Eliot's '
REFERENCES
Calder, Angus,
1987 : T.S. Eliot,
Coleridge, S. T. ,
1967 . Biographia Literaria, Vols. I & II (ed.) J. Shawcross,
Eliot, T.S,
1950. Selected Essays, New edn; New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. First published in 1950.
1964a . Introduction: 1928 to Selected poems of Ezra Pound.
1964b : The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.
1965 . To Criticize the Critic.
1969 . The Sacred Wood.
1986 . On Poetry and Poets.
Huq, Ahsanul,
1979 : 'Wastelander Kabi",
Lobb, Edward,
1981. T.S. Eliot and the Romantic Tradition.
Spender, Stephen,
1975 : T:S. Eliot. Gt.
Wilson, Edmund,
1965 : The Bit Between My Teeth.
No comments:
Post a Comment