BOO KS
301
his famous old phrases, "dissociation of sensibility" and "objective cor–
relative," were after all .only "conceptual symbols for emotional pre–
ferences," but that they were efficacious just because they justified and
explained his own poetry. This much is worthwhile, as is the essay's
biographical information-Eliot's description of three phases in
his
critical writing or of his curiously ambivalent attitude toward D. H.
Lawrence.
Part of the trouble with this volume is that
all
the pieces, except
the two from 1917, are lectures that were never tightened up for publica–
tion. The series on education is so long-winded and vacuous as to
be
unreadable. The other lectures are good enough-and "From Poe to
Valery" is so good-as to make us appreciate Eliot's rigor in not having
collected them in
On Poetry and Poets.
"American Literature and the
American Language," "The Literature of Politics" and "The Classics
and the Man of Letters" are abortive; they raise interesting questions,
but either ramble away from them or do not develop them as would
a full-scale essay. "What Dante Means t.o Me" is valuable, since Eliot
tells how he learned from Baudelaire to use the sordid aspects of the
modern big city as a subject for poetry, and learned from Dante to
locate the city in hell. When he discusses the technical problem of
writing in "Little Gidding" the equivalent to a canto of Dante, we see
the master-critic operating again. But even this fine little piece is, as
Eliot makes clear at the outset, a mere postscript to the big "Dante"
of
Selected Essays.
In the "Classics" essay, we behold an erstwhile leader of the avant–
garde distinguish between taste and fashion, and warn-a warning
pertinent to New York at this moment-that the present danger may
be "the eccentricity and even charlatanism of the new." The antidote,
says Eliot, is a sense of literary continuity. But he is surely falling back
on ritualistic homage in suggesting classical education as a panacea.
What I read as a lack of confidence may be Eliot's own sense in these
essays that he has not really thought their subjects through.
"From Poe to Valery" tries to account for the disparity ·between
Poe's middling position in Anglo-American letters and the reverence
in which he was held by such impressive judges as Baudelaire,
Mallarme
and Valery. Eliot shows how "impure" Poe's language is, how he
sacrifices sense to sound. But Eliot thinks the Frenchmen did not know
English well enough to be disturbed by this; they were able to find in
Poe's attention to sound a model for
la
poesie pure.
Valery found in
"The Philosophy of Composition," in which Poe analyzes the composi–
tion of "The Raven," a method and a subject-that of observing him–
self write. But Eliot has little respect for "The Philosophy of Composi–
tion"-it may be a hoax. He hlU not in short a good word to
say
pi
