For the poet, according to T.S. Eliot, ‘emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquillity" is an inexact formula’ . It is with this moment in Tradition and the Individual Talent that Eliot’s early criticism most explicitly confronts Wordsworth’s pervasive influence on poetic discourse, especially that of the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, on conceptions of the way poetry ought to be composed and the ways emotion and experience ought to be filtered by language. Although throughout much of the rest of his early criticism Eliot leaves tacit his relation to Wordsworth, this relation, in resemblance and conflict, animates Eliot’s early poetic project. The critical essays show two strains - those which abstractly theorise about poetic practice, and those which, in parallel, engage with the historical continuum of poetic discourse, such as his review, The Metaphysical Poets. Among themselves, these essays constitute the same function as Wordsworth’s Preface - prose manifestos defending a new and controversial practice of writing poetry, as the later essay, To Criticize the Critic, avows, in a conspectus of his earlier motives, that
both in my general affirmations about poetry and in writing about authors who had influenced me, I was implicitly defending the sort of poetry that I [wrote].
The difference between them is in method and attitude; Eliot’s essays are multiple, journalistic, unadvertised as a setting-out of his own doctrine, spread over time, whereas the Preface appears bald and complete in public form attached to the poetry it justifies. Both reject the poetics of their recent pasts [‘I have always been very sensible of the absence of any masters of the previous generation whose work one could carry on’ - Eliot: Letter to Virginia Woolf, 22.05.1924, Berg Collection] and have a nostalgic justification for their poetic novelties that seeks to revive a putative golden age. Wordsworth’s takes the form of a primitivist naturalism, considering ‘the earliest poets of all nations... [who] wrote naturally, and as men’ to have had an authentic voice, where later pretenders ‘ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the influence of such language, and desirous of producing the same effect without being animated by the same passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of these figures of speech’. In its effect, this opinion corresponded to a broadly revolutionary stance with reference to the prevailing poetics of his day, as he proclaimed his rejection of the heightened, consciously ‘poetic’ diction of the whole early modern period. This meant that justification of his own poetics consisted in establishing to the world the quality of his innovations on their own merits, stating why his innovations were superior to the Augustan idiom that had governed eighteenth century taste.
Eliot, however, articulates a troubled relation to tradition, taken to mean ‘all the ideas, beliefs, modes of feeling and behaviour which we have not time or inclination to investigate for ourselves we take second-hand’ [Reflections on Contemporary Poetry], a concept of which he approved in general:
we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.
As a conservative, he sought to efface the newness of what he produced to gain legitimacy from some past paradigm - asserting his poems’ credentials as inheritors of validity from a precedent that they resemble. His criticism rehearses a search for an inheritance to take up - which ancestors to embrace - in an attempt to position his innovations, his individual talent, in an already-existing framework of tradition. This search consists in critical comparisons of historical poetic movements to Eliot’s own criteria of poetic quality and position. At various later points in his critical discourse, Eliot admits a parallel between his own position on his early reception as a poet about 1920 and that of Wordsworth at the turn of the nineteenth century. His catalogue of critical types in To Criticize the Critic places Wordsworth and Eliot in the same category, the ‘critic whose criticism may be said to be a by-product of his creative activity’. Further, in his essay Wordsworth and Coleridge, Wordsworth is described as writing the Preface ‘while in the plenitude of his poetic powers and while his reputation was still only sustained by readers of discernment’ , precisely corresponding to Eliot as a young revolutionary outsider to the poetic hegemony.
However, despite the structural similarities between the positions of the two, the correspondence is elided in Eliot’s critical grand narrative, appropriating metaphysical poetics into the present as set out in The Metaphysical Poets. Eliot enters into a conservative dialectics: to solve a problem with the recent past (thesis), simply posit a lost golden age, which represents a time before the corruption of which you disapprove (antithesis), and revive that past to reanimate the present (synthesis).
For Eliot, the thesis is the ‘sentimental age’ of poetry that ‘began early in the eighteenth century’, reaching its nadir in the post-Romantic movement begun by Tennyson and Browning. This poetic discourse, though pervasive, was inadequate to the pressures of modernity in the early twentieth century, Eliot asserts, to the extent that
If the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged.
The antithesis is the metaphysical ‘movement’, whose place in the mainstream of poetic discourse had been usurped at the advent of the sentimental age and whose poetry was considered a baroque backwater, unread and underappreciated in Eliot’s sentimental present after its method sustained centuries of attack. Eliot quotes Samuel Johnson’s critique of their characteristic conceit, which Eliot so admires, in that 'the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together', opposing the notion of an extended metaphor being successful in its conjunction of seemingly unrelated concerns, that it has to force them together rather than uniting them. The synthesis comprises poets such as Eliot inspired by the aims of metaphysical discourse, reworking its ‘method’ to re-accommodate poetry to modernity.
Eliot’s historical scheme organises the difference between metaphysical and sentimental poetry by referring to the quality of ‘sensibility’ possessed by their writers; the virtues of the former crystallise around its ‘unified sensibility’, the latter is corrupted by ‘dissociation of sensibility’. The text figures the metaphysical ‘poet’s mind [as] perfectly equipped for its work... [possessing] a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience’, equating the poetic mind it idealises with industrial apparatus; further, the activity of that mind is figured by verbal metaphors of the industrial process - ‘modified... amalgamating... transmuting... transforming’. The mental attitude of the sentimental poet, by contrast, is characterised as diffuse and hesitant - ‘they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose... they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected’ - divided between decadence and shallowness - ‘while the language became more refined, the feeling... the sensibility, expressed... is cruder’ - inefficient and unproductive - instead of the poet turning his interests into poetry, he merely meditated or ‘ruminated’ on them poetically.
Eliot’s principal justification for his poetic project to align it in the genealogy is that modern poetics should accommodate itself to modernity. In The Metaphysical Poets he sets out what formal features modern poetry ought to use in order to recover the relation of immediacy between language and sensibility and gives as examples those modernist innovations that made his own recent poems so controversial while leaving tacit that his normative claims about how poetry should be correspond with his own productions:
poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.
The differences between the poetic effects and surfaces produced by the metaphysicals and the modernists are great and numerous, so Eliot’s parallel between his methods and the metaphysical conceit only reaches the concreteness of a loose analogy, however, here he identifies exactly how Romantic aesthetic theory is incompatible with his impersonal poetics:
how completely any semi-ethical criterion of "sublimity" misses the mark. For it is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.
The rhetoric of impersonality in Eliot’s criticism does not correspond to a dearth of engagement with personal emotion in the poetry, rather to the apprehension of emotion that, while preserving a sense of immediacy, is generalisable beyond the individual voice. It is Eliot’s ambition that poetry can enact:
a real advance, a development, in human consciousness; it sets down, within this verse, the unity of an experience which had previously only existed unconsciously; in recording the physical concomitants of an emotion it modifies the emotion... modifying an emotion by a thought and a thought by an emotion. [The Clark Lectures: Lecture I, Introduction: On the Definition of Metaphysical Poetry]
This essay will now test this ambition, and the conceptual concerns examined thus far, against La Figlia Che Piange, a poem largely concerned with imaginations of poetic composition and individual experience. Its three stanza structure inhabits three tenses, each of which code for a different mode of seeing the same situation, providing a commentary on the perspectives available to the poet and the process of writing poetry, emotion recollected in performance. The first stanza, articulating commands for the immediate future, seems to exclude itself from the present moment much as it is expressed in the present tense, uneasy with the difficulty of facing one’s own experience. It takes on the second person address of the director to the actor, searching for the most affecting correspondence between external circumstances and internal emotion, along the lines of the objective correlative , alighting on, after the colon, ‘But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair’. The dashes as connectives, running in counter-motion, blur the line of thought into a series of impressionistic or imagistic observed moments. This effect opens up another reading - the lines serving as the equivalent for remembered detail, rehearsing a process of memory in language and articulating the blurring between recalling events recorded in memory and commanding or orchestrating characters in the mind.
The second stanza repositions the first in time, its timeless present becoming a reappropriation of the past, by itself taking the past conditional. The movement of the poem in time now destabilises the reading, undermining the knowledge a reader can apprehend of the situation as described. The first couplet of the second stanza brings the events of the first into perspective as a hypothetical situation, which may not correspond with the one moment of unqualified declaration at the start of the third stanza, anchored in the past tense, ‘She turned away’; the anaphoric deixis, ‘So’, presents a further problem of reference - suspended between meaning ‘in this way’ and ‘then’. As with much of Eliot’s poetry, the boundaries between persons are not clearly defined; in this case the ‘I’ and the ‘he’ occupy an uneasy position on the edge of conflating themselves. It is unclear if the I of the second stanza is the same detachedly spectating, directing voice articulated in the first expanding its sphere of co-ordinating influence over the actions of the man that provoked the flowers to be flung. Alternatively, the gap left in the first stanza of what caused this ‘fugitive resentment’ is an inflection of the voice’s remembering his own actions and his lover’s reaction, coming to self-spectate in memory. On this reading, the strange possibility of doubling a single person into two with hindsight sets up a parallel split between the self that experiences the scene and the self that conceives of the visual in language, engaging with questions of recollection and how versification codes for the process of bringing back. Again, the stanza searches for a correspondence in its last line with the objective correlative [c.f. Hamlet and his Problems], seemingly rejecting the two similes at its centre.
What pairing the ‘we’ refers to remains ambiguous among the poetic voice, ‘he’, and the woman. The poem, about the difficulties of people pairing up, similarly uses rhyme to organise both the sound patterning and inflect the narrative’s anticipation of retrospection, relating forward and back as do the narrative readjustments of changing tenses. The third stanza expresses how the anguish of one of the participants leads to the later discomfort of the other; without the changes in tense, the poem would not occupy the uneasy position it does between the present and past.
Taking umbrage most forcefully with the ‘tranquillity’ of the Wordsworthian formula, Eliot’s poetics seems rather to embrace emotion recollected in crisis or anxiety. The criticism focuses on the process of poetic composition as an immediate and intense act of combination and amalgamation analogous to the metaphysical conceit. Further, it employs the rhetorically structured connective language of the metaphysical lyric while within that structure searching for generalisable correspondences between psychological the psychological process of apprehending emotion and its representation in language.
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