T. S.

Eliot on Poe
B. R. McElderry, Jr.
University of Southern California
The background of T. S. Eliots well-known essay From Poe to Valry (1949) is more complex than is generally realized. Since certain pungent remarks on Poe in that essay are so frequently quoted, often out of context, it may be worthwhile to review some of the shifts in Eliots critical position on Poe preceding the 1949 essay. It will be well, however, to look at the later essay first. From Poe to Valry is typical of Eliot in many ways. Just after receiving the Nobel Prize, he delivered it as a lecture at the Library of Congress in November, 1948; in the next twelve months it appeared in print three times (1). Based on the well-known interest in Poe taken by Baudelaire, Mallarm, and Valry, the essay contrives an emphasis relevant to the contemporary scene, just as Eliot had previously made John Donne and the metaphysical poets relevant to twentieth-century poetry. The apologetic tone so frequent in Eliots writing is at once apparent. He is not attempting, he says, a judicial estimate of Poe, though parts of the essay, especially paragraphs one and four, do constitute an estimate, judicial or otherwise. Examined in detail, Eliot writes, Poes work seems to show nothing but slipshod writing, puerile thinking, and haphazard experiments. Poes diction is sometimes inexact, as in my most immemorial year and a stately raven. Yet Poes work as a whole is a mass of unique shape and impressive size. The ordinary cultivated reader (Eliot himself, of course) recalls a few short poems which enchanted him for a time when he was a boy, and which do somehow stick in the memory. Such a reader also recalls the tales, and notes their influence on detective and science fiction. But the impact of Poe on three French poets Baudelaire, Mallarm, Valry has been much more profound. What did they see in Poe that such a reader as Eliot missed? Baudelaire, Eliot thinks, found in Poe the type of le pote maudit, the rebel against society and against middleclass morality. Mallarm found in Poes technique stimulation because of its very contrast to traditional French verse. Valry found Poes theory of poetry emphatic of the poem as an end in itself, prophetic of la posie pure; prophetic, too, of the intense interest in the poetic process so characteristic of the French symbolists. This essay of 1949, however, as indicated, was preceded by several little known comments on Poe. The first of these is a review of the second volume of The Cambridge History of American Literature in 1919 (2); the essay has never been reprinted because Eliot later professed to be horrified by some of his comments on American literature (3). After objecting to the miscellaneous character of the Cambridge History, Eliot writes: The three important men in the book are Poe, Whitman and Hawthorne. Professor [Killis] Campbell, writing on Poe makes his article turn on Poes genuine and unappreciated merits as a critic. It is not a point of vast importance, as most of the writers whom Poe criticized are embalmed only in their coffins and in Poes abuse; but Poes intellectual abilities should not be [column 2:] overlooked; and he was the

directest, the least pedantic, the least pedagogical of the critics writing in his time in either America or England. It is a pity that Professor Campbell fails to analyse Poes peculiar originality as a poet. He perceives the relation of Poe to Byron, Moore and the Romantic movement in general, but misses observing that Poe is both the reductio ad absurdum and the artistic perfection of this movement. After discussing Hawthorne, Eliot returns to general comment: Hawthorne, Poe and Whitman are all pathetic creatures; they are none of them so great as they might have been. But the lack of intelligent literary society is not responsible for their shortcomings; it is much more certainly responsible for some of their merits. The originality, if not the full mental capability, of these men was brought out, forced out, by the starved environment. The originality gives them a distinction which some heavier-weight authors do not obtain. Poes Ulalume, Eliot goes on to say, appears more creative and more distinguished than Shelleys The Witch of Atlas. In this early review Eliot makes no mention of Poes French influence, nor had Killis Campbell. There is something of condescension toward Poe, yet there is appreciation for Poes critical independence and his originality. To assert that Poe was more distinguished than Shelley was in 1919 a useful maneuver in Eliots own war on the taste of his time. In 1926, Eliots Note Sur Mallarm et Poe (4) first registered an interest in Poes French influence. Beginning with the customary tone of apology others are far more qualified than he to write of Mallarm Eliot states that he wishes only to define a type of poet. Both Mallarm and Poe are metaphysical poets, and like Donne, indulge in speculation without belief. They are properly distinguished from truly philosophical poets like Dante and Lucretius. Mallarm and Poe are also distinct from the type of poet properly described as l hallucin. When we read the poetry of Rimbaud or Blake, we enter a different world; with Mallarm and Poe we have a heightened sense of a familiar world. Along with the element of incantation is the aim of giving a purer sense to the words employed. This element of incantation is of course not imputed to Donne, the other metaphysical poet referred to. In 1927 Eliot reviewed Hervey Allens Israfel (5). This biography, he thought, mingles important and trivial details with little sense of proportion; worse, it strives to be creative by presenting conjectured scenes as if they were actual ones. The real and important Poe remains inscrutable. Eliot considers that after the death of Byron, only Poe and Heine inherited the spirit of English Romanticism; they, along with Baudelaire, influenced in turn by Poe, seem more modern than their contemporaries. One aspect of Poes work needing more attention is his criticism; echoing the judgment of Campbells chapter, Eliot announces that Poe was not only an heroically courageous critic . . . . but a critic of the first rank. In 1943, Eliots A Dream Within a Dream (6) offered a brief estimate of Poes achievement: no American author has counted for more in European literature than Edgar Poe. Though much of Poes writing now seems old-fashioned to the point of absurdity, there are a dozen poems and more than a dozen tales which, once read, are never forgotten. Poe belongs neither to American nor to European tradition. He is a European who [page 33:] knew Europe only in imagination. Poes critical essays,

particularly The Philosophy of Composition, stamp Poe as an intellectual: no poetry of feeling is further from sensuality or even sensuousness. He lives in a world of dreams, shadows, and regrets for a lost, unpossessed and unattainable love. Poes poetry was original: That is to say, his vision of life, though limited, was peculiar and coherent and his idiom unmistakable. In this short essay the pattern of From Poe to Valry clearly emerges: the importance of Poe as critic; the intellectual originality which kept Poe from being just an imitative Romantic; and the influence of Poe on the European tradition which included Baudelaire and Heine. As we have seen, an earlier note linked Poe with Mallarm; Valry, who died in 1945, was a natural addition. In April, 1948, Eliot was invited to deliver a lecture at the University of Aix. The essay published in December, Edgar Poe et la France, is presumably a revision and translation of that lecture (7). In turn, this essay was an early draft of From Poe to Valry, Eliots best-known pronouncement on Poe. The French text differs from the English essay chiefly in rearrangement of ideas. A few incidental remarks dropped from the French text are of interest. In paragraph thirty, for example, Eliot insists that despite the theorizing of Mallarm, subject will retain importance in the poetry of the future; as proof, he says, he can turn from Mallarm to the pages of Victor Hugo. Again, in paragraph thirty-four, Eliot alludes to Wordsworth and Coleridge as representing for him the central current of poetry from the end of the eighteenth century. Yet much fine poetry in many languages has been written outside the central current; Poe and Baudelaire are examples. Eliots American Literature and the American Language (8), delivered as a lecture in 1953, alludes briefly to Poes French influence and to his comparatively minor influence on American and English poetry. And he remarks that the dream world of Poes poetry was probably conditioned, more than we realize, by the actual world of the Baltimore and Richmond he knew. So far as I can determine, Eliots last word on Poe appears in his Foreword to Joseph Chiaris Symbolisme from Poe to Mallarm (London, 1956). Chiaris text includes some twenty references to Eliot, all duly reverent: I cannot do better than to quote what Mr. T. S. Eliot says (pp. 5-6). Eliot, naturally, welcomes Chiaris book as the first in English on Mallarm, and repeats several of the comments first expressed in the note of 1926. The Symbolist movement, he adds, is the most important movement in the world of poetry since that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The term movement is specifically defined as a continuity of admiration. Eliots views of Poe are to be found in the scattered sources described above, sometimes with surface inconsistencies that need close comparison and attention to context. From these various comments it is evident that Eliot never really liked Poe, and felt superior to him in much the same way that Emerson and Henry James did. Eliots interest in the French Symbolist poets, however, came as early as 1908, and their debt to Poe was inescapable (9). Gradually Eliot worked out an intellectually acceptable explanation. French views helped him to see Poe as an earlier colleague in his own attack on American [column 2:] and English provincialism. Students of Poe, however, would have been better served if Eliot had summed up in one systematic essay his experience with Poe (10), so as to show his progress from the horrifying opinions of 1919 to his final judgments.

NOTES (1) Donald Gallup, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (New York, 1953), entry A 52, shows that this essay was delivered as a lecture at the Library of Congress, November 19, 1948. It was then privately printed by Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949; reprinted in The Hudson Revieva, II (Autumn 1949), 327-341; and issued as a pamphlet by the Library of Congress, 1949. My quotations are from The Hudson Review. The essay was included in Eliots To Criticize the Critics (New York, 1965), pp. 27-42, and it appeared in Eric W. Carlsons Recognition of Poe (University of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 205219. (2) The Athenaeum (April 25, 1919), pp. 236-237 (Gallup, entry C 74). A notable passage regarding Hawthorne was quoted by F. O. Matthiessen in The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (New York, 1935), p. 22, and in The American Renaissance (New York, 1941), p. 193; also in The Literature of the United States, ed. Walter Blair, Theodore Hornberger, Randall Stewart (New York, 1946), I, 982. Eliot had written: Neither Emerson nor any of the others was a real observer of social life. Hawthorne was, and was a realist. He had also, what no one else had the firmness, the true coldness, the hard coldness of the genuine artist. (3) In 1961 a brief sentence from Eliots 1919 review was quoted out of context by Clarence A. Brown in Walt Whitman and the New Poetry, American Literature, XXXIII (March 1961), 41. My note to this effect was rejected by the editors of American Literature, but they suggested that the 1919 review might be worth reprinting in full. Accordingly, I wrote to Mr. Eliot, suggesting that he himself reprint it, possibly with other scattered comments on American literature. He replied, April 25, 1962, that he was so horrified by the opinions in the excerpts I quoted that he had no desire to inspect the whole article in the files of the Athenaeum. The 1919 opinions do not seem to me so horrifying as they did to him; his later opinions on Poe seem a natural development from those early comments. (4) La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, XXVII (November 1926), 524-526; trans. Ramon Fernandez. Gallup, entry D 46, gives the wrong volume number. This issue was devoted to Mallarm, and Eliots brief note was no doubt requested. (5) Nation and Athenaeum, LXI (May 21, 1927), 7, 219. Gallup, entry C 207. (6) Listener, XXIX (February 25, 1943), 243-244. Gallup C 487. Presumably this was a BBC talk, but neither Listener nor Gallup notes the exact date. (7) La Table Ronde, #12 (December 1948), pp. 1973-1992; trans. Henri Fluchre. Gallup, D 84, says: A translation of the lecture delivered at Aix in April, 1948, upon which From Poe to Valry is based.

(8) Included in To Criticize the Critic (New York, 1965), pp. 43-60. (9) In a review of Peter Quennells Baudelaire and the Symbolists (Criterion, IX, January 1930, 357-359), Eliot dates his interest in the Symbolist poets from his reading of Arthur Symons volume on the subject in 1908. (10) It is notable that in no later essay does Eliot refer to any of his earlier pronouncements. Nor does he allude to Aldous Huxleys influential Vulgarity in Literature (1930), which in its first paragraph linked Baudelaire, Mallarm, and Valry with Poe nearly twenty years before Eliot did so. Huxley, of course, simply dismissed the French estimates of Poe as wrong. Huxleys essay appeared in The Saturday Review of Literature, VII (September 27, 1930), 158-159; it also appeared in book form (London, 1930), and was included in Huxleys Retrospect (New York, 1933).