Saturday, December 17, 2011

T. S. Eliot on Marvell, Emotions, and the Particular

T. S. Eliot's reaction to Andrew Marvell's poetry is particularly helpful in understanding Eliot's views on how emotion works in good poetry. The following quote from Eliot's "Andrew Marvell" essay provides a useful place to begin:

"Marvell takes a slight affair, the feeling of a girl for her pet, and gives it a connexion with that inexhaustible and terrible nebula of emotions which surrounds all our exact and practical passions and mingles with them."

In this section of the essay Eliot compares a lofty and spiritual poem by William Morris to Marvell's "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn." Eliot compares the "slightness" of Marvell's subject and the "loftiness" of Morris's, but then he suggests that the subject treated in a poem is not related to its quality. Instead, an emotion's exactitude determines its power.

At first glance, this appears to be a version of the age-old dictum in creative writing classes: "Show, don't tell." Marvell shows a real emotional response to a particular situation, while Morris speaks in generalities.

But for Eliot's poetic practice, I think there's more to it than this. First, there's a sense that ideas are more limited than experience. It's not that experience precedes ideas; one doesn't merely pull ideas from experience. Ideas are one-sided and therefore incomplete. Eliot believes that particular experience involves negotiating opposites. He quotes Coleridge on the power of Imagination, which "reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities." Ideas cannot approach truth in the way that particular experience can because ideas are not just vague but also emptied of contradictions. Eliot values Marvell's "bright, hard precision" because it offers "shades of feeling to contrast and unite."

Looking at Eliot's poetry, I would argue that The Waste Land is essentially about the inextricability of opposites within the self. Most obvious is the contrast between life and death, but underneath this is the contrast between desire and the absence of all desire. The repeated image of a planted corpse that sprouts is one such example; another is the image of the dead that walk in crowds; another is the figure of Tiresias, the man transformed into woman.

In this sense, Tiresias is not a mythical figure used for merely metaphorical purposes, but is seemingly more real because he unites opposites. The intensity of this union, however, is the poem's primary subject. Tiresias, the manifestation of man/woman, witnesses the sexual incident between the typist and "the young man carbuncular":

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at tea-time

The poem explores the problem of "throbbing between two lives." The episode examines aggressive and permissive sexuality (cast as masculine and feminine, respectively), but it also overlays each of these upon the other. Tiresias is a complex figure but also the representation of an ambivalent experience that Eliot attempts to understand. To despise one's desire is not to divest one's self of it.

While this theme is a far cry from where Marvell gently intones his wit, Eliot recongizes that Marvell's variety of particular images opens up vast possibilities. Eliot makes a provocative reference to Dante's use of variety and particularity when he writes: "if anyone doubts whether the more refined or spiritual emotion can be precise, he should study the treatment of the varieties of discarnate emotion in the 'Paradiso.'" I'll have to leave Dante for another day, including the tantalizing reference to "discarnate" emotion, but it suffices here to point out that Eliot valorizes poetry of the particular that calls on the tension of opposites in order to understand emotion.

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