Implicit in this is the social nature of experience and of literature. Each one must read for himself, but he must be taught how to read by the society in which he exists and has come to belong. And each one’s understanding of the words which he reads is determined by the way in which words are used by society.
We must remember our own society as well as the poet and the reader when we come to the first metaphor in T. S. Eliot’s first book. This metaphor may very well be the beginning of modern American and English poetry, for it is likely that the reader will begin with this poem and this metaphor, when he begins to read the poetry of this age.
…. When the evening is stretched out against the sky,
Like a patient etherized upon a table
With this metaphor, J. Alfred Prufrock, the protagonist of the poem, begins to express — which means to press out what is within — his inner anguish of being.
To compare an evening sky to a patient upon an operating table is perhaps a forced comparison, considered in itself. For the visual image of the patient must be inverted; we must look down at the patient, but we must look up at the evening sky. What is important about the metaphor, considered as poetry, is the way in which two very different things have been joined. Considered in the most general way, within the context of how poetry is written in English, the important thing about this metaphor is the width of its sensibility or sensitivity. Although Keats studied to be a doctor, he could not have written such a metaphor; and neither Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, Rossetti, nor the poets of Yeats’ generation were capable of a consistent apprehension of experience in such a way. A conception of poetry and of the nature of the poetic prevailed, which prevented these poets from thinking in terms of such a metaphor. This very conception of the nature of poetry was itself installed by Wordsworth and Coleridge, who in turn introduced a sensibility or sensitivity different from the eighteenth-century conception of poetic style and diction.
Wordsworth, by means of a new poetic style, a new use of words, rhythms, and images, made possible a new consciousness of nature. Eliot and other modern poets have made possible a new consciousness of modern life.
Yet to speak in this way of a new consciousness of modern life is to risk a misunderstanding which has deceived many poets, critics, and readers. A poet does not achieve a new apprehension of experience merely because he writes about new experience, and many poets have made the error of supposing that they were holding a mirror up to nature because they wrote poems about the automobile or the railroad train. In the same way, some poets have been misunderstood and condemned because they did not write about automobiles, trains, and the industrial character of modern life. But to expect this of the poet is to expect him to be a camera, an automatic register of experience.
The new experience of modern life made possible by Eliot’s poetry is a new sense of the actual, new in that it joins for us things which in ordinary experience exist far apart from each other. Our sensitivity to experience has been widened not because two objects have been newly joined, but because the relevance of any two such objects to each other and to human thought and emotion has been shown.
It is thus essential to consider the actual, and the sense of the actual in Eliot’s poetry. The sense of the actual and the supreme power to grasp it has been one of the great virtues of Eliot’s poetry from the very start.
The actual is that which exists. It is not that which we would like to exist, nor what we hope will exist, nor what we are taught should exist. The failure to distinguish between what is actual and what is not is the cause of much weakness and blindness. The power to grasp the actual is also very important in any effort at understanding what is possible and what is ideal.
The actual is like a moist handshake, damp with nervousness or the body’s heat. This should suggest degrees of actuality and the difference between such a handshake and the gloved hand of an ambassador. The latter is also actual, but one has encountered less of the reality of the person.
“Rocks, moss, stone-crop, iron, merds,” as Eliot writes in one poem, are instances of actual things. But it would be wrong to suppose that things are more actual than feelings or motives. “I don’t like eggs; I never liked eggs” is an instance of how colloquial speech brings us an actual person, or a definite time and place. “Disordered papers in a dusty room” are an instance of the decay and disorder of the actual.
Yet the sense of the actual is narrow and deceptive when the actual is identified or limited to the sordid, the squalid, and the dirty. On the other hand, it is the refusal to admit or pay attention to this aspect of the actual which makes many human beings shut their eyes, draw the window shades, or seek out the many other devices for escaping from reality. Thus it is significant that in some of Eliot’s early poems there is an effort to satirize the genteel in speech and in manners. But if “carious teeth” are actual, the “inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold” is just as actual. And order is as actual as disorder. We are wrong only when we take the aspiration or the wish for order for actual order.
Hence Eliot as a critic speaks of the peculiar honesty of the great poet. This honesty is the moral quality of mind which insists upon knowing what is actual, no matter how unpleasant the judgement may be.
The actual eludes formulation because it is the foundation for all formulation and for all statements about what is true and what is not true. One must attempt definition merely by pointing. In the end, one must point to the color, blue, in order to identify it, and this pointing is useless, too, to the blind.
The sense of the actual must be refreshed repeatedly, and in the course of this book, the reader ought to try what is said and what is cited by invoking his own sense of what is actual. As the reader continues to examine Eliot’s work and this effort to describe his work, the actual and the sense of the actual will turn out repeatedly to be the very heart, the inner warmth and source of movement, of the subject.
The progress of poetry — the process by which one method and style of writing is succeeded by a new one — is inspired by the way a given convention of style that once made possible the experience of the actual has been made habitual and stock, to the point at which, instead of helping the poet to arrive at the actual, it is a block or barrier between him and his subject. It is also a barrier between a new kind of poetry and a reader who is devoted to the style of a previous period. The style and idiom of Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poetry was the barrier which Eliot had to break through when he began to write poetry, and it was precisely the familiarity with this kind of poetry which made his new work seem wrong and unpoetic to habitual readers of poetry. Such a scorn is natural because it is natural for the reigning taste to take for granted and proclaim its universality.
1. Schwartz seems to have wanted to cut this bracketed portion, having handwritten the brackets and crossed it out on the typescript.
2. In the manuscript there is an illegible handwritten correction above “his best friend.”
3. There is more illegible handwriting around “would not feel.”
4. Schwartz’s brother’s name was actually Kenneth.
5. In the manuscript, “two thousand” is changed to “ten thousand.”
6. In the manuscript, “much more delicacy” is changed to “infinite tact.”