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of one's life. (Frank Kermode has drawn attention
to
this sequence in his
introduction to Eliot's
Selected Prose.)
In May 1935 Eliot wrote
to
Stephen Spender:
You don't really criticize any author
to
whom you have never sur–
rendered yourself.... Even just the bewildering minute counts; you
have
to
give yourself up, and then recover yourself, and the third
moment is having something
to
say, before you have wholly for–
gotten both surrender and recovery. Of course the self recovered is
never the same as the self before it was given.
"The bewildering minute" is a phrase from
The Revenger's Tragedy.
Eliot quoted it in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), again
the following year in an essay on Massinger, and ten years later in an
essay on Tourneur:
Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?
A more authoritative text reads: "For the poor benefit of a bewitching
minute." Eliot preferred the reading I've quoted. We find a similar ges–
ture, but transformed, in the fifth part of
The Waste Land:
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract.
And there is a memorable passage,
to
place beside those lines, in Eliot's
major essay on Dante:
The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and
of a lifetime.
It
is very much like our intenser experiences of other
human beings. There is a first, or an early moment which is unique,
of shock and surprise, even of terror
(Ego dominus tuus);
a
moment wh;ch can never be forgotten, but which is never repeated
integrally; and yet which would become destitute of significance if
it did not survive in a larger whole of experience; which survives
inside a deeper and a calmer feeling. The majority of poems one
outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority
