T.S.Eliot on Poe

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T. S. Eliot on Poe

B. R. McElderry, Jr.

University of Southern California

The background of T. S. Eliots well-known essay From Poe to Valry (1949) is more

complex than is generally realized. Since certain pungent remarks on Poe in that essay

are so frequently quoted, often out of context, it may be worthwhile to review some of

the shifts in Eliots critical position on Poe preceding the 1949 essay.

It will be well, however, to look at the later essay first. From Poe to Valry is typical

of Eliot in many ways. Just after receiving the Nobel Prize, he delivered it as a lecture at

the Library of Congress in November, 1948; in the next twelve months it appeared in

print three times (1). Based on the well-known interest in Poe taken by Baudelaire,Mallarm, and Valry, the essay contrives an emphasis relevant to the contemporary

scene, just as Eliot had previously made John Donne and the metaphysical poets

relevant to twentieth-century poetry. The apologetic tone so frequent in Eliots writing

is at once apparent. He is not attempting, he says, a judicial estimate of Poe, though

parts of the essay, especially paragraphs one and four, do constitute an estimate, judicial

or otherwise. Examined in detail, Eliot writes, Poes work seems to show nothing but

slipshod writing, puerile thinking, and haphazard experiments. Poes diction is

sometimes inexact, as in my most immemorialyear and astately raven. Yet Poeswork as a whole is a mass of unique shape and impressive size. The ordinary

cultivated reader (Eliot himself, of course) recalls a few short poems which enchanted

him for a time when he was a boy, and which do somehow stick in the memory. Such areader also recalls the tales, and notes their influence on detective and science fiction.

But the impact of Poe on three French poets Baudelaire, Mallarm, Valry has

been much more profound.

What did they see in Poe that such a reader as Eliot missed? Baudelaire, Eliot thinks,

found in Poe the type ofle pote maudit, the rebel against society and against middle-class morality. Mallarm found in Poes technique stimulation because of its very

contrast to traditional French verse. Valry found Poes theory of poetry emphatic of the

poem as an end in itself, prophetic ofla posie pure; prophetic, too, of the intense

interest in the poetic process so characteristic of the French symbolists.

This essay of 1949, however, as indicated, was preceded by several little known

comments on Poe. The first of these is a review of the second volume ofThe

Cambridge History of American Literature in 1919 (2); the essay has never been

reprinted because Eliot later professed to be horrified by some of his comments on

American literature (3). After objecting to the miscellaneous character of the Cambridge

History, Eliot writes:

The three important men in the book are Poe, Whitman and Hawthorne. Professor

[Killis] Campbell, writing on Poe makes his article turn on Poes genuine and

unappreciated merits as a critic. It is not a point of vast importance, as most of thewriters whom Poe criticized are embalmed only in their coffins and in Poes abuse; but

Poes intellectual abilities should not be [column 2:] overlooked; and he was the
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directest, the least pedantic, the least pedagogical of the critics writing in his time in

either America or England. It is a pity that Professor Campbell fails to analyse Poes

peculiar originality as a poet. He perceives the relation of Poe to Byron, Moore and the

Romantic movement in general, but misses observing that Poe is both the reductio ad

absurdum and the artistic perfection of this movement.

After discussing Hawthorne, Eliot returns to general comment:

Hawthorne, Poe and Whitman are all pathetic creatures; they are none of them so great

as they might have been. But the lack of intelligent literary society is not responsible for

their shortcomings; it is much more certainly responsible for some of their merits. The

originality, if not the full mental capability, of these men was brought out, forced out,

by the starved environment. The originality gives them a distinction which some

heavier-weight authors do not obtain.

Poes Ulalume, Eliot goes on to say, appears more creative and more

distinguished than Shelleys The Witch of Atlas.

In this early review Eliot makes no mention of Poes French influence, nor had Killis

Campbell. There is something of condescension toward Poe, yet there is appreciation

for Poes critical independence and his originality. To assert that Poe was more

distinguished than Shelley was in 1919 a useful maneuver in Eliots own war on the

taste of his time. In 1926, Eliots Note Sur Mallarm et Poe (4) first registered an

interest in Poes French influence. Beginning with the customary tone of apology

others are far more qualified than he to write of Mallarm Eliot states that he wishes

only to define a type of poet. Both Mallarm and Poe are metaphysical poets, and like

Donne, indulge in speculation without belief. They are properly distinguished from truly

philosophical poets like Dante and Lucretius. Mallarm and Poe are also distinct from

the type of poet properly described as l hallucin. When we read the poetry ofRimbaud or Blake, we enter a different world; with Mallarm and Poe we have a

heightened sense of a familiar world. Along with the element of incantation is the aim

of giving a purer sense to the words employed. This element of incantation is of course

not imputed to Donne, the other metaphysical poet referred to.

In 1927 Eliot reviewed Hervey AllensIsrafel(5). This biography, he thought, minglesimportant and trivial details with little sense of proportion; worse, it strives to be

creative by presenting conjectured scenes as if they were actual ones. The real and

important Poe remains inscrutable. Eliot considers that after the death of Byron, onlyPoe and Heine inherited the spirit of English Romanticism; they, along with Baudelaire,

influenced in turn by Poe, seem more modern than their contemporaries. One aspect

of Poes work needing more attention is his criticism; echoing the judgment of

Campbells chapter, Eliot announces that Poe was not only an heroically courageous

critic . . . . but a critic of the first rank.

In 1943, Eliots A Dream Within a Dream (6) offered a brief estimate of Poes

achievement: no American author has counted for more in European literature than

Edgar Poe. Though much of Poes writing now seems old-fashioned to the point of

absurdity, there are a dozen poems and more than a dozen tales which, once read, are

never forgotten. Poe belongs neither to American nor to European tradition. He is aEuropean who [page 33:] knew Europe only in imagination. Poes critical essays,
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particularly The Philosophy of Composition, stamp Poe as an intellectual: no poetry

of feeling is further from sensuality or even sensuousness. He lives in a world of

dreams, shadows, and regrets for a lost, unpossessed and unattainable love. Poes

poetry was original: That is to say, his vision of life, though limited, was peculiar and

coherent and his idiom unmistakable. In this short essay the pattern of From Poe to

Valry clearly emerges: the importance of Poe as critic; the intellectual originalitywhich kept Poe from being just an imitative Romantic; and the influence of Poe on the

European tradition which included Baudelaire and Heine. As we have seen, an earlier

note linked Poe with Mallarm; Valry, who died in 1945, was a natural addition.

In April, 1948, Eliot was invited to deliver a lecture at the University of Aix. The essay

published in December, Edgar Poe et la France, is presumably a revision and

translation of that lecture (7). In turn, this essay was an early draft of From Poe to

Valry, Eliots best-known pronouncement on Poe. The French text differs from the

English essay chiefly in rearrangement of ideas. A few incidental remarks dropped from

the French text are of interest. In paragraph thirty, for example, Eliot insists that despite

the theorizing of Mallarm, subject will retain importance in the poetry of the future;as proof, he says, he can turn from Mallarm to the pages of Victor Hugo. Again, in

paragraph thirty-four, Eliot alludes to Wordsworth and Coleridge as representing for

him the central current of poetry from the end of the eighteenth century. Yet much

fine poetry in many languages has been written outside the central current; Poe and

Baudelaire are examples.

Eliots American Literature and the American Language (8), delivered as a lecture in

1953, alludes briefly to Poes French influence and to his comparatively minor

influence on American and English poetry. And he remarks that the dream world of

Poes poetry was probably conditioned, more than we realize, by the actual world of the

Baltimore and Richmond he knew.

So far as I can determine, Eliots last word on Poe appears in his Foreword to

Joseph Chiaris Symbolisme from Poe to Mallarm(London, 1956). Chiaris text

includes some twenty references to Eliot, all duly reverent: I cannot do better than to

quote what Mr. T. S. Eliot says (pp. 5-6). Eliot, naturally, welcomes Chiaris book as

the first in English on Mallarm, and repeats several of the comments first expressed in

the note of 1926. The Symbolist movement, he adds, is the most important movement

in the world of poetry since that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The term

movement is specifically defined as a continuity of admiration.

Eliots views of Poe are to be found in the scattered sources described above, sometimes

with surface inconsistencies that need close comparison and attention to context. From

these various comments it is evident that Eliot never really liked Poe, and felt superior

to him in much the same way that Emerson and Henry James did. Eliots interest in the

French Symbolist poets, however, came as early as 1908, and their debt to Poe was

inescapable (9). Gradually Eliot worked out an intellectually acceptable explanation.

French views helped him to see Poe as an earlier colleague in his own attack on

American [column 2:] and English provincialism. Students of Poe, however,

would have been better served if Eliot had summed up in one systematic essay his

experience with Poe (10), so as to show his progress from the horrifying opinions of

1919 to his final judgments.
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NOTES

(1) Donald Gallup, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (New York, 1953), entry A 52, showsthat this essay was delivered as a lecture at the Library of Congress, November 19,

1948. It was then privately printed by Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949; reprinted in

The Hudson Revieva, II (Autumn 1949), 327-341; and issued as a pamphlet by the

Library of Congress, 1949. My quotations are from The Hudson Review. The essay was

included in Eliots To Criticize the Critics (New York, 1965), pp. 27-42, and it appearedin Eric W. CarlsonsRecognition of Poe (University of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 205-

219.

(2) The Athenaeum (April 25, 1919), pp. 236-237 (Gallup, entry C 74). A notable

passage regarding Hawthorne was quoted by F. O. Matthiessen in The Achievement ofT. S. Eliot(New York, 1935), p. 22, and in The American Renaissance (New York,1941), p. 193; also in The Literature of the United States, ed. Walter Blair, Theodore

Hornberger, Randall Stewart (New York, 1946), I, 982. Eliot had written: Neither

Emerson nor any of the others was a real observer of social life. Hawthorne was, and

was a realist. He had also, what no one else had the firmness, the true coldness, the

hard coldness of the genuine artist.

(3) In 1961 a brief sentence from Eliots 1919 review was quoted out of context by

Clarence A. Brown in Walt Whitman and the New Poetry,American Literature,XXXIII (March 1961), 41. My note to this effect was rejected by the editors of

American Literature, but they suggested that the 1919 review might be worth reprinting

in full. Accordingly, I wrote to Mr. Eliot, suggesting that he himself reprint it, possibly

with other scattered comments on American literature. He replied, April 25, 1962, that

he was so horrified by the opinions in the excerpts I quoted that he had no desire to

inspect the whole article in the files of theAthenaeum. The 1919 opinions do not seemto me so horrifying as they did to him; his later opinions on Poe seem a natural

development from those early comments.

(4) La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, XXVII (November 1926), 524-526; trans. RamonFernandez. Gallup, entry D 46, gives the wrong volume number. This issue was devoted

to Mallarm, and Eliots brief note was no doubt requested.

(5) Nation and Athenaeum, LXI (May 21, 1927), 7, 219. Gallup, entry C 207.

(6) Listener, XXIX (February 25, 1943), 243-244. Gallup C 487. Presumably this was a

BBC talk, but neitherListenernor Gallup notes the exact date.

(7) La Table Ronde, #12 (December 1948), pp. 1973-1992; trans. Henri Fluchre.

Gallup, D 84, says: A translation of the lecture delivered at Aix in April, 1948, upon

whichFrom Poe to Valry is based.


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(8) Included in To Criticize the Critic (New York, 1965), pp. 43-60.

(9) In a review of Peter QuennellsBaudelaire and the Symbolists (Criterion, IX,

January 1930, 357-359), Eliot dates his interest in the Symbolist poets from his reading

of Arthur Symons volume on the subject in 1908.

(10) It is notable that in no later essay does Eliot refer to any of his earlier

pronouncements. Nor does he allude to Aldous Huxleys influential Vulgarity in

Literature (1930), which in its first paragraph linked Baudelaire, Mallarm, and Valry

with Poe nearly twenty years before Eliot did so. Huxley, of course, simply dismissed

the French estimates of Poe as wrong. Huxleys essay appeared in The Saturday Review

of Literature, VII (September 27, 1930), 158-159; it also appeared in book form

(London, 1930), and was included in HuxleysRetrospect(New York, 1933).

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T.S.Eliot on Poe