ANOTHER LETTER TO OUR ELIOT CLASS
January 29, 2005

Dear folks,

"Man proposes; God disposes." You'd have thought that the weekend blizzard was
enough snow, but Mother Nature obviously enjoyed it so much she sent more our way the
day of our last class. I was sorry not to meet with you, but I also thought the cancellation
was something of a blessing in disguise since now we'll have TWO final Eliot classes in
April. That means a) that we can do all four of the "Four Quarets" (in addition to
"Hollow Men" & "Journey of the Magi," so we'll span his entire career following "The
Wasteland") & b) we all now have time to really immerse ourselves in Eliot's poetry,
which as best I can tell is really the only way to "get" it. And that reminds me of the
Lionel Trilling remark I mentioned in our last class. Here it is in the glorious original:
"Until you have read a poem at least a dozen times, you haven't even begun to get
acquainted with it, much less to know what it means." Notice that he speaks of
acquaintance, not knowledge or deep familiarity. It's my hope that you'll read the "Four

Quartets" at least once a week between now & our last two meetings in April, without
any irritable reaching after understanding or interpretation, just surrendering as much as
possible to the language, which of course includes the rhythms of the poems (&, yes,
their meanings). That SOUNDS like a tall order, but isn't in the actual doing of it. And
I'm pretty sure that anyone who does it will end up with a lifelong possession of
significance & joy.

What follows is a bunch of things I want to pass on to you that I've gleaned from
reading a terrific study of Eliot: The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature
of Poetry by F. O. Matthiessen, Oxford University Press, 1947. I'll number things for
easy reference in case you want to discuss them when we next meet. It's my hope that
these excerpts will help you in your reading & thus improve your understanding of
Eliot's poetry.

1. You know how people who get frustrated with a passage of poetry often say
"Why doesn't s/he just SAY it?" Well, here's an answer from T. E. Hulme, a minor
English poet & major theoretician of the day who influenced Pound & Eliot & lots of
other modernist writers. "Plain speech is essentially inaccurate. It is only by new
metaphors . . . that it can be made precise." So in this view, the complex or difficult way
may in fact be the clearest way. (F. O. Mattheissen, 29)

2. From Eliot, at the close of The Use of Poetry: "I believe that the poet naturally
prefers to write for as large and miscellaneous an audience as possible, and that it is the
half-educated and ill-educated, rather than the uneducated, who stand in his way: I myself
should like an audience which could neither read nor write." (FOM, 41)

3. Speaking of how certain writers work, Eliot said that "In some minds certain
memories, both from reading and life, become charged with emotional significance. All
these are used, so that intensity is gained at the expense of clarity." (FOM, 56) So if a
particular passage keeps thwarting your understanding, ask yourself if it's in any way
emotionally intense. And if it is, is that some kind of compensation for a lack of clarity?

4. From Matthiessen: "…the qualities of spirit that rise above frustration in Eliot's
later poems . . . are those which affirm the value of renunciation, sympathy,
and tenderness." (70)

5. Eliot coined the phrase "auditory imagination," partly to explain his own practice,
& here's his best explanation of it: it is "the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating
far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every work; 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 the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current,
and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality." (81)
Eliot often prizes the primitive, as here, & once said that he thought the origin of poetry
was probably "a savage beating a drum."

6. Eliot wrote that the primary thing for the poet "is not to have a beautiful world
with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the
boredom, and the horror, and the glory." (102)

7. From Matthiessen: "Through the completeness of his portrayal of the almost
insupportable conditions of human existence, [the great artist] frees his audience from the
oppression of fear; and stirring them to new heart by his presentation of an heroic
struggle against odds, he also enables them to conceive anew the means of sustaining and
improving their own lives. Only thus can he communicate both 'the horror' and
'the glory.' (107)

8. For Eliot, one of the greatest services of poetry lies in its power to "make us from
time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the
substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant
evasion of ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world." (108)