The Sacred Wood by T. S. Eliot

First published: 1920

Type of work: Critical essays

Critical Evaluation:

Matthew Arnold, says Eliot, was not so much engaged in establishing a criticism as in striking at the uncritical; he was less a critic than an advocate and champion of criticism. These statements about Arnold are only partly true, but they are helpful. They are equally helpful, while again only partly true, if applied to Eliot himself. For Eliot is not only a critic of literature but also, as the subtitle of this volume suggests, a critic of criticism. In the first group of essays in THE SACRED WOOD this fact is made particularly clear.

Eliot does not really tell us, in “The Perfect Critic,” precisely what the perfect critic is. We gather that Arthur Symons, the successor, in his impressionism, to Pater and Swinburne, is less than perfect because what is not realized in Mr. Symons’ verse can be found in his critical prose. The functions of the poet and the functions of the critic should not be confused.

The critic, we are told, should look only and firmly at the literary work. His aim should be the fair exercise of comprehension, and the free comprehension is that which is completely dedicated to inquiry. Bad criticism is nothing more than an emotional response; that is, of the critic’s own feeling. A true literary critic should be void of emotions, says Eliot, except those brought about by a work of art. The end and aim of the true enjoyment of poetry is contemplation in its pure state, from which all the mishaps of personal emotion have been withdrawn.

These ideas are followed up in “Imperfect Critics,” a series of brief essays in which Eliot discusses Swinburne, George Wyndham, Charles Whibley, Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, and Julien Benda as critics. Swinburne is praised before he is dismissed as a person who appreciates rather than criticizes. Literature is to him simply an ardor. Wyndham’s enthusiasm for literature fails to offset a lack of critical depth; he is the typical English Man of Letters to whom literature is but a hobby. Whibley is capable of communicating a taste for literature, but he is not a critic. All three of these English writers lack the faculty of keeping themselves separate from the work, the ability to achieve a state of contemplation freely detached from literature and to see it from all sides.

The American critics, More and Babbitt, have attempted to create a criticism free of temperament. In this respect they show the influence of French criticism, an influence lacking among English critics since Arnold. Both suffer, however, from a certain academic solemnity, a type of provincialism which tends to offset the broadening influence of French criticism. It is, in fact, a French critic, Julien Benda, who seems to rank highest in Eliot’s mind among these Imperfect Critics. He has something the American critics do not, formal beauty; but, handicapped by the age in which he writes, he is reduced to being the perfect example of a gleaner of the mediocre of the times.

In the first two essays Eliot demonstrates that the critic, as critic, must suppress his own temperament: it is irrelevant to the art he is examining. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” he says that the poet too must suppress his individual temperament: he must seek to express a certain medium, not a personality. In fact, poetry is not a releasing of emotion, but rather a flight from emotion; it is not the showing of personality, but a flight from personality. The poet can extinguish mere personality by submerging himself in the mainstream, the tradition, of literature. What makes a writer traditional is the possession of the historical sense, an insight not only into the pastness of the past but also of its continuing presence today. The poet should view the past not as something dead but as something already living—and himself as a part of that living organism.

When Eliot discusses the possibility of a poetic drama in the chapter with that title, he observes that poetic drama, as a vital form, died out when it was no longer believed in as a dramatic tradition. The nineteenth century was aware of the tremendous cleavage between the past and the present, but not of the continuity between past and present. The nineteenth century lacked traditional forms to work in and as a result made literature a vehicle for ideas. But art should not present ideas but replace them. Form itself—traditional form—is in itself an exact way of thinking and feeling. It is through form that art should make its statements, that is, by being, not simply expressing, a way of life.

“’Rhetoric’ and Poetic Drama” makes the point that “rhetoric” is not properly used to mean inflated speech but is rather, at best, the correct manner of speech for a given situation, correct because it comes from that which it expresses. The chapter titled “The Blank Verse of Marlowe” traces Marlowe’s development as a dramatist by examining the innovations in his use of blank verse.

The essay “Hamlet and His Problems” is best known because it contains Eliot’s judgment that Hamlet is “an artistic failure” and because it expresses his theory of the “objective correlative.” The play fails because there is no objective correlative for the emotions of Hamlet the character, no external equivalent (a collection of objects, a circumstance, a series of events) for his internal state of being. Emotions per se cannot be dramatized. Hamlet goes mad because he is in the grips of an emotion which fails to find release in action; Shakespeare fails because he is confronted with an emotion he is not able to represent in art.

In the chapter on Ben Jonson, Eliot attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of a dramatist who, he says, is now the interest only of people concerned with literary history or antiquity. His defense rests largely on the claim that Jonson’s plays are self-contained worlds. His characters may not have the added dimension that Shakespeare’s characters have, but Jonson’s characters fit logically into the emotional world of their time. The world Shakespeare depicts is larger, but no more complete, than Jonson’s. Though Jonson did not attempt to achieve a “third dimension,” his world is large enough, one in which a poetic imagination has free play. The point Eliot makes is simply that Jonson should be judged on his own terms.

As Jonson succeeds, by virtue of creating a self-contained world, so Philip Massinger fails because he did not create a world of art from within his personality. He is a brilliant technician but not, in the deepest sense, an artist, and the reason is that his feeling for things was left behind by his feeling for language. There is no correspondence between language and things; his style is involved, but his feeling—his imaginative vision—is simple, and merely covered over by acquired ideas. Massinger’s talent is unquestionable, but his imagination, says Eliot, is meager.

Applying the same test to Swinburne that he had to Jonson and Massinger, Eliot find that the world of Swinburne’s poetry does indeed have the required entirety and self-sufficiency for lastingness and justification. It is a world of a unique kind, however, a world of words. Swinburne is therefore not properly subject to the ordinary sort of criticism, which assumes that art necessarily corresponds to the real world. Swinburne’s world does not depend on the world it imitates. Rather, it creates its own limits and establishes its own terms; it has its existence not in the meanings of words but in their sounds.

In the essay on Blake, Eliot returns to the idea of tradition. Eliot acknowledges Blake’s many merits but finds him handicapped by not having at his disposal an inherited set of beliefs. Blake invented his own philosophy and therefore he was inclined to put more stock in it than an artist should; that is why he was eccentric. We have a certain respect for his philosophy, but we should realize that it was a fault of his environment that compelled Blake to provide himself with it. His genius needed, but lacked, a framework of already well-entrenched ideas which would have kept him from doing his own philosophizing and allowed him to keep his mind on the problems of the poet.

At the end of the Blake essay Eliot writes that Dante is a classic, and Blake simply a poet of genius, because Dante used his background of mythology, theology, and philosophy as a framework for his art. The next essay, appropriately enough, and the last in the volume, is “Dante.”

Philosophical poetry, says Eliot, is legitimate poetry if the philosophy is necessary to the arrangement and the arrangement is necessary to the poetic beauty of the parts. The poetry of Lucretius is legitimate philosophical poetry because Lucretius endeavored to discover the tangible poetic equal for his philosophical systems and to find its actual equal in vision. His philosophy, however, was not full enough in varied feeling to be capable of full expansion into pure vision. Dante, on the other hand, not only had at his disposal mythology and theology which had been deepened and rounded by time, a frame for ideas which Lucretious did not have; but also a set of beliefs and assumptions that were more comprehensive, more ordered, and more complete than those of Lucretius. Consequently, Dante’s philosophy was capable of being translated into a great vision, comprehensive, ordered, and complete. The goal of a poet is to present a vision. The fact that his visions are so complete is a great merit of Dante’s poetry. And his philosophy is not merely stated but is expressed by its appropriate poetic equivalent, its vision. Dante succeeded in handling his philosophy, not as a theory but in terms of something discerned, better than any other poet has been able to do.

Bibliography

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Browne, Elliott Martin. The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Donoghue, Denis. Words Alone: The Poet, T. S. Eliot. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000.

Eliot, Valerie, ed. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1898-1922. Vol. 1. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s New Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.

Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: Norton, 1999.

Litz, A. Walton, ed. Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of “The Waste Land.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.