DENIS DONOGHUE
11
of "in a white gown" after "to contemplation" is so "right," or explain
the effect of Eliot's changing one letter to get from "blown" to "brown"
and back again, making another repetition across the "brown" in the
middle. Nor had 1 any notion of a poetics governing Eliot's procedures
in this or any other poem.
II.
ELIOT
DID
NOT
WRITE
a
Poetics
or an
Aesthetic:
he did not think of him–
self in competition with Aristotle, Lessing, Kant, Hegel, Croce, or Vas–
concelos. He did not try for anything as systematic as Northrop Frye's
Anatomy of Criticism
or Stanley Burnshaw's
The Seamless Web.
When–
ever he found himself approaching a large question of Theory, he
backed off, reminding himself that poets engage in Theory because they
are not writing poems. At the end of
The Use of Poetry and the Use of
Criticism,
he says:
"If,
as James Thomson observed, 'lips only sing when
they cannot kiss,' it may also be that poets only talk when they cannot
sing.
I
am content
to
leave my theorising about poetry at this point. The
sad ghost of Coleridge beckons to me from the shadows." Besides, EI iot
knew that
1.
A. Richards would always have the advantage of him in the
theory of poetry.
The most lasting parts of Eliot's prose are his appreciations of par–
tiCLdar authors, but the timeliest parts, the essays we have reason
to
recite and to keep going back to, are those in which he emphasized that
literature exists and that it is not a mere delivery service for political,
religious, or other values.
"I
have assumed as axiomatic," he wrote in
"The Function of Criticism," "that a creation, a work of art, is
autotelic; and that criticism, by definition, is
about
something other
than itself."
If
so much is agreed, it becomes possible to examine the
relations between a work of literature and other considerations, meta–
physical, moral, and political.
If
it is not agreed, we find ourselves beset
by confusion of categories, as at present when it is difficult to gain a
hearing for the claim that a work of literature exists with just as much
autonomy as a piece of music, a sculpture, or a painting.
It
would be futile
to
try to deduce a poetics or an aesthetic from Eliot's
essays in the theory of poetry and poetic drama. 1 am content to refer to
certain passages in which he indicates what one's relation to a work of
literature might be-or rather, passages in which he describes an ideal
sequence, starting with the first shock or blow of recognition and cul–
minating in the incorporation of the work of literature as a constituent
