T.
S. iLIOT
dramatic, as "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark." I do not mean to say that
Eliot's emphasis upon the dramatic in poetry is not justified and fruit–
ful to a certain extent; for example, there is a sense in which we can
say that Gray's Elegy is less dramatic than, let us say, Donne's "The
Funeral," which might be taken as a kind of elegy. My point is that
Eliot sometimes uses this criterion of the dramatic to enforce pre–
judices about poetry which he does not like for other reasons.
We corne, finally, to the question of versification. It is here that
Eliot has been most influenced by his own poetic practice. For at one
time or another he has enunciated practically every possible theory
of what the nature of versification is. In a late essay on the poetry
of Yeats he says that blank verse cannot be written in the 20th cen–
tury because it still retains its period quality. The period presumably
is
the Elizabethan one, and such a statement is belied by the fact
that not only has some of Eliot's best poetry been written in blank
verse, but such a statement disregards the triumphs of blank verse, the
inexhaustible variety of this form of versification to be found in' Mil–
ton, Wordsworth, in Keats' "Hyperion," in certain poems of Tenny–
son which Eliot himself has praised precisely for their technical mas–
tery of blank verse, and in Browning; many other instances could be
mentioned. Eliot's fundamental concern has been, however, with
what he calls the "auditory imagination," "the feeling for syllable
and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and
feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and
forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back; seek–
ing the beginning and the end." This should suggest that underneath
the contradictory statements about the possibilities of versification
which run throughout Eliot's criticism, there
is
a powerful intuition
of how various, unpredictable, and profound are the possibilities of
language when it is versified. The quotation I have just cited should
suggest certainly that Eliot has found versification a means of raising
to
the surface of consciousness much that is otherwise concealed. We
ought to remember Goethe's remark about Wordsworth, which is
quoted by Matthew Arnold in his essay on Wordsworth: that Words–
worth was deficient as a poet because he knew too well the reason he
chose every word and line. This paradoxical remark is not based upon
a belief that the poet ought to
be
irrational and spontaneous, but, I
think,
based upon the sense that through rhythm the poet drew upon
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