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.

Worms of Death and Life in Section Six of H.D.'s "The Walls Do Not Fall"

In section six of "The Walls Do Not Fall," H.D. employs the worm as a symbol for human persistence: "In me (the worm) clearly / is no righteous, but this- // persistence." The section takes on a narrative flow as it describes the life of a worm; it escapes predators, explores a leaf, and eats leaf and wheat. H.D. shows the reader this tiny drama, which is used to advance significant claims about the power of poetry and reflection in the face of human activity.

First, she conveys the worm's insult to the reader (or at least human beings in general); the worm points out our inability to understand such miniscule affairs:

unintimidated by multiplicity
of magnified beauty,

such as your gorgon-great
dull eye can not focus

nor compass

Humans have "gorgon-great" and "dull" eyes that cannot comprehend the minutiae of the worm's world. H.D. offers a challenge to the reader's perspective. This is an example of Sarah H. S. Graham's argument that H.D. "is at war with her audience" (found in the journal Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.2). Graham's point, however, isn't merely to suggest that H.D. is antogonistic, but that she argues with the human self.

In this way, H.D. seeks other perspectives from which to consider the potential for human understanding. The comparison of small and large in this section allows H.D. to question the epistemological tools at our disposal. The vividness of this section and the fact that the poet can assume the worm's viewpoint suggests that we can overcome the challenge of our size in order to understand things outside the usual scope of our perspective. In other words, the evidence provided by this section and the poem as a whole reveals our capacity for understanding.

Significantly, however, it is also evident that this sort of success is only possible through poetry. Metaphor, as a poetic and linguistic manuever of the mind, opens up the possibility for this type of seeing. The importance of poetry and language as a record of human experience and capability is emphasized throughout the poem (for example in sections 8-11).

The intruiging move in this section is H.D.'s transition from outward action and inward revelation. The section ends with an end to the worm's adventures:

I am yet unrepentant,

for I know how the Lord God
is about to manifest, when I,

the industrious worm,
spin my own shroud.

The shroud usually indicates death, of course, but the juxtaposition of industriousness (and escape and exploration) throughout the section is chillingly terminated by the specter of death and stillness indicated by the shroud. How does one read the repeated emphasis on persistence in light of this ending? First, we must remember that a "shroud" for a worm might indicate a cocoon created during the pupa stage of an insect. That is, the shroud might indicate transformation more than death. Second, the image of a cocoon is useful in looking at the succeeding sections of the poem in which H.D. contemplates contemplation. She considers how one shuts one's self off from human experience in order to formulate and express the meaning of that experience. I hope to follow her investigations (and post on them) as I read the rest of the poem.

Water as a Complex Symbol in "The Waste Land"

"Death by Water," Section IV of "The Waste Land," is by far the shortest individual section of the poem, but it seems integral to the poem as a whole. Many of the poem's themes are concentrated in these ten lines:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Eliot develops a productive tension between forgetting and remembering. The dead sailor forgets the surface world, but the speaker urges the listener to remember the sailor. It seems that life may be forgotten when one enters the realm of death, but the reverse is not true: the living are to remember the dead. The dead inhabit the living.

The persistence of death in life is a theme touched upon throughout the poem, right from the beginning in which April's cruelty is evidenced by its "breeding / lilacs out of the dead land" (1-2). In "Death by Water," we see a foreshadowing of our death, since the sailor, "who was once handsome and tall as you," was not so virile as to avoid death. Since death seems to be at both ends of life, and life (in "The Waste Land") is comprised of remembering death, we seem always to emerging out of and into death.

An interesting contrast to the pervasiveness of death, however, is the collection of attempted sexual encounters through the poem. In some ways, sex (and reproduction more specifically) is a stay against death. We perpetuate ourselves and our species by producing the next generation. Eliot, who was moved by anthropological accounts of vegetation ceremonies, seems to call upon these notions in his choice of myths and symbols. Moreover, he was familiar with Remy de Gourmont's thought, which included radical ideas on the significance of sex in human behavior.

A productive intersection of Gourmont's and Eliot's perspectives occurs in the theme of unity. Gourmont points out in The Natural Philosophy of Love, "fecundation is the reintegration of differentiated elements into a unique element, a perpetual return to unity" (13). Eliot, as I've mentioned in other posts, is intensely interested in unity, as well. "Death by Water" presents the ultimate failure of sexuality. There is no redeeming aspect to this section; it represents a negative object lesson. There is no positive transformation (however cruel) in this section. Instead, the "current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers" (315-316).

As Brooker and Bentley point out in Reading The Waste Land, "Death by Water," despite its bleak sense of closure, is NOT the end of the poem. Instead, it comes just before the final section, "What the Thunder Said." In this way, Eliot situates the ending against the backdrop of unproductive death; it provides a contrast for what follows. The offerings of "What the Thunder Said" are unified with the drowned sailor and cannot be the offerings they are without him. The urgency of the rock and water section is intensified because it occurs after "Death by Water." Furthermore, the experience of water as both deadly and life-giving in such close proximity achieves a richer and more affecting reaction.