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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

MOTIVE

i. Influence beyond style, beyond innovationT.S. Eliots body of work, despite its modest size, has had an enormous

influence, both on Eliots contemporaries and those writing in the wake of themodernist poetic tradition, of which Eliot is arguably at the centre. Eliots own

aesthetic project was a reaction against the languid, sentimental poetry of the

late 19th century, stressing, for example in The Metaphysical Poets (1921), the

use of innovative but precise imagery, a method exemplified by the 17th century

Metaphysicals, of whose poetry he remarks thatthe meaning is clear, the

language simple and elegantsimple and pure (Eliot, SP,62). At the same time,Eliots poetry is almostdeliberately impenetrable, this a commitment to theprinciple that the poetry of his erathat is, of a fraught, war-ravaged

modernitymust be difficult (65). To this end, there arose the heavily literateand fragmentary bricolage that has come to define Eliots style. In entirely

literary-historical terms, then, Eliots influence might be thought of mostly interms of stylistic innovation, part of a larger, modernist avant-garde.

Yet, in William Empsons perhaps misleadingly-titled The Style of the Master

(1948), Empson opens with a startling statement, not so much an appraisal of

Eliots stylistic and aesthetic contributions to English poetry than a strange,

ambivalent personal testimony. Empson writes: I feel, like most other versewriters of my generation, that I do not know for certain how much of my own

mind he invented (Empson, 152, emphasis mine). One implication of Empsonsconfession, in which he attributes, perhaps nervously, the very foundations of his

thinking to Eliot, is the possibility that, beyond the radical, insistentmodern-ness of Eliots style exists something else that is arresting about his poetry,

something which can be said to operate on the deepest structures of thought and

experience. As Empson goes on to say, Eliot has a very penetrating influence,

perhaps not unlike an east wind (ibid): the effect is mental, perhaps even

spiritual.

Empsons admission of an uneasy indebtedness echoes a sentiment Eliot

expresses in his 1930 essay on Charles Baudelaire, whom he credits with having,

through refining a vocabulary of poetic images for the demands contemporary

life, created a mode of release and expression for other men. For Eliot,

Baudelaires greatest achievement was an inventionof language (Eliot, SP, 234,

emphasis mine). Here, as with Empsons mystical east wind, Baudelaire, for Eliot,had a powerful, constituting influence. Eliot would remark in a later essay, What

Dante Means to Me (1959) that reading Baudelaire taught him that the source

for new poetry might be found in what had been regarded hitherto as the

impossible, the sterile, the intractably unpoetic (Eliot, TCTC, 126). The sense

here is that Baudelaires new language enabledEliots poetry, and is perhaps

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part of the animating force behind it, that which brings to life, to first intensity,(SP, 234) hitherto dead or enervated materials.

What Baudelaire opened to Eliot, essentially, were the poetic possibilities of the

cityscape, the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis which, through

Baudelaires poetic treatment, became elevated to a new, phantasmagoricalplane (TCTC, 126). Yet, as William Chapman Sharpe suggests, this availability of a

new poetic vocabulary alone did not enable Eliot to fecundate the citys barrenimages (114). Instead, for Sharpe, Eliots treatment of the cityscape first requireda complex inter-textual relationship between the elder poets genius and Eliotsown lived experience (115), a fertile relation that Eliot in his Tradition and the

Individual Talent calls a conformity between the old and the new, throughwhich the past [is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by

the past (SP, 39). The key idea here is how Eliots own urban experiencescatalysed his inheritance ofan inventory of sterile images to produce an

intense, poetic city.

It is the lived experience that forms the basis of this papers inquiry, though

this is not to suggest a brand of solely biographicalanalysis, against which

Empson returns, here, as a point of departure. The effect Eliot had on Empson

and his contemporaries, that inventive, perhaps mythic or spiritual, but

nonetheless vague structuring force, might be extrapolated to a general sense of

the poetrys powerful resonance to the present day. This vagueness might behelpfully elucidated by a consideration of the lived experience as it finds it way

into the poetry. Could Empson and his contemporaries, by claiming to have been

invented by Eliot, in fact have seen a common lived experience in Eliots

poetry, and that like Baudelaire to Eliot, this encounter gave them a newlanguage for living in their moments? Could, following from this, the resonance

of Eliots poetry be traced to a writing, at the poetrys deepest structures, of anauthentic ontological reality? These questions lead to the city, the theatre of

modern experience, in which are played out various mental and spiritual dramas.

In the paradigmatic poet of the city, Baudelaire, Eliot found both a way to

incorporate the city into his poetry (a strategic and innovative use of imagery),

and a way to cope with (or, at least, express) the predicament of urban living.

The second of these, the way in which the poetry grapples with the urban

predicament, is less clearly expressed than the first, but this predicament is

arguably that which makes Eliots poetry unique, and has the mysterious, if nottroubling, qualities of Empsons east wind.

ii. Situating Eliot in a tradition of city writing[ReferenceMonograph: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, VerlaineThe City]

To Eliots mind,