P o in t of V ie w in T. S. E lio t ’s P o e try
by Kristian Smidt
The problem of point of view as I shall use the term here and as I have used
it in an earlier essay on the Victor i an poets, is one that arises mainly when a
poem is composed in the first person. It has to do with the identity of the ‘I’,
or the supposed speaker o f the poem, and of the ‘you’, or the person who is
addressed by the speaker. The choice of the grammatical first and second per­
sons rather than the third is usually a choice of point of view. Thus W ordsworth
reveals his own thoughts and feelings in ‘/ wandered lonely as a cloud . . . ; ’
while Coleridge in The Rime o f the Ancyent Marinere records the narrative of
an imaginary character, who is himself introduced by means of narrative in the
opening stanzas: ‘And he stoppeth one of three.’
The use of the first person, however, does not necessarily mean that the poet
is speaking in his own voice. He may have wanted to write a straight monologue
for an imaginary character, as W ordsworth obviously did in The Complaint o f
a Forsaken Indian Woman. This poem goes immediately into direct speech:
Before I see a n o th er day,
O h let m y body die away!
So the point of view can only in part be determined by the use of pronouns.
And sometimes there are no pronouns to denote the speaker and the person
or persons spoken to at all. The point of view must be inferred, from verb forms
or by other means. Imperatives like ‘Look!’ and ‘Listen!’ presuppose someone
speaking to somebody else. And even the progressive form of the verb may
indicate the point of view, since it suggests an observer describing a present
experience. Thus in Eliot’s lines
In this decayed hole am ong the m ountains
In the faint m oonlight, the grass is singing
there are both the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ and the progressive form ‘is
singing’ to argue an observer present at the scene described.
There are usually enough of these signs in a poem to give a sufficient indica-
Point of View in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
tion of the point of view. And generally there is no need for the poet to preface
his poem with an explanation of the degree of subjectivity or objectivity to be
found in it. If no other indication is given the ‘I ’ is naturally assumed to be that
of the poet himself and the ‘you’ to refer to the reader. Our use of language for
communication makes this normal. One person is understood to be uttering
his thoughts in poetic form to another person reading his words or listening to
them. This is what T. S. Eliot has called the second voice of poetry, that of the
poet speaking to an audience (the first voice being that of the poet talking to
himself). But whereas Communications in the first person are generally expected
to be truthful, in poetic Communications this does not strictly apply. No one
expects the poet to be completely accurate with regard to details and actual
facts, especially autobiographical facts. There is such a thing as the poet’s first
person, which is a universally accepted thing, and which may be defined as the
identity of the poet as he chooses to reveal it in his works. It is quite under­
stood th at the poet may be speaking his own m ind even though he may be
using symbols or invented happenings to do so.
Yet in many cases it is still not clear whether the poet is addressing us or
we are listening to a piece of drama. There is a great deal of ambiguity of this
kind in the poetry of the Yictorians. It is hard to decide, for instance, who the
T is in Tennyson’s Locksley Hall or in Browning’s The Last Ride Together. And
the problem is no less evident in modern poetry. In faet I wonder whether the
blurring of the point of view may not be the chief reason for much of the obscurity that is complained of in our time. It would be interesting and, no doubt,
rewarding to make a comprehensive study of recent verse to determine its use
of point of view. This would require a great deal of time and space, but a good
beginning could be made with the poems of T. S. Eliot. I propose to examine
some of them with the object of seeing to w'hat extent and, if possible, for what
reasons, the point of view is ambiguous or obscure.
If one considers the whole body of Eliot’s lyrical output, one will find a preponderance o f poems in the first person. But they occur with somewhat varying
frequency in his different collections.
Thus in the Prufrock collection of 1917, the T is very much in the centre
o f the stage, both in the fairly long poems and in the short ones like Morning
at the Windoxv and Conversation Galante. Longish monologues like The Love
Song, Portrait o f a Lady and the slightly later Gerontion offer a special difficulty
of personal reference. How, for instance, is one to interpret the following lines
in Gerontion ? -
Kristian Smidt
I w ould m eet you upon this honestly.
I th a t was n ear y our h eart w as rem oved therefrom
T o lose beauty in terror, terro r in inquisition.
If the reader thinks the characterisation of the old man is sufficient to give him
an identity, then who is the ‘you’ ? M ost readers will probably be left guessing.
In the 1920 Poems, apart from Gerontion and one or two more, the focus
is much more frequently on people described from the outside and presented
in the third person: Burbank and Bleistein, Sweeney, the honeymooning couple
of Lune de M iel. This change is accompanied by a formal change, from the
irregular metrics and confidential, conversational tone of the early collection
(which includes even a short piece printed as prose - Hysteria) to the regular,
rhymed, tetram eter stanzas of the 1920 Poems.
The change may have had something to do with the substitution of Gautier
for Laforgue as a model. It also, perhaps, had something to do with the influence o f Imagism on Eliot when he composed the poems o f the later collec­
tion, many of the Pr u f rock pieces having been written before he became acquainted with the Imagists, or even before they existed as a school. But mainly
I think it has to do w ith E liot’s own critical ideas as he developed them about
1917. In his famous essay on ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ he presents
what he calls an ‘Impersonal theory of poetry’. Speaking of the importance of
the poetic tradition to the development of the poet, he says:
W hat happens is a continual surrender o f him self as he is at the m om ent to som ething which
is m ore valuable. T he progress o f an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a c o n tin u a l extinction
o f personality.
The poet, Eliot further insists, must use his emotions and feelings as poetic
material, but in the process of composition this material is fused and transformed into something quite different, and the emotion that arises is ‘a new art
em otion’, a ‘significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and
not in the history of the poet’.
The Poems of 1920, then, may have been written in pursuance of a deliberate
policy of depersonalisation.
After 1920 there is on the whole a return both to the freer prosody and to
the predom inant use of the first person which we found in the Prufrock volume.
The longer poems m ostly alternate between passages of direct speech and pas­
sages of impersonal reflection and description. I refer to The Waste Land, The
Hollow Men, Ash-Wednesday and the Four Quartets. Of these, The Waste Land
is surely most difficult. And the difficulty is largely inherent in the point of view.
Point of View in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
The Ariel Poems and Coriolan are mainly dramatic monologues presenting
historical or legendary individuals identified by means of names or titles. Even
these monologues, however, are not always completely and historically objective. The T of Marina is only very vaguely the Pericles of Shakespeare’s play
who lost and found his daughter. And in Journey o f the M agi the landscape is
not only O riental to suit the ostensible characters, but is also that of countries
more familiar to the poet:
T hen at daw n we cam e dow n to a tem perate valley,
W et, below the snow line, sm elling o f vegetation;
W ith a running stream and a w ater-m ill beating the darkness,
A nd three trees on the low sky,
A nd an old white horse galloped aw ay in the m eadow .
A passage in The Use o f Poetry and the JJse o f Criticism helps us to recognise
some of Eliot’s personal memories in the ‘water-mill beating the darkness’ and
the ‘Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver’. His own point of
view therefore seems to merge with that of the Magus, making it indeterminate.
We will look more closely at three poems in which the indeterminate point
of view is very evident and which at the same time seem to me and perhaps to
most readers to be particularly captivating: The Love Song ofJ. AlfredPrufrock,
La Figlia Che Piange and The Waste Land.
The Love Song o f J. Alfred Prufrock uses the pronouns ‘I ’, ‘you’, ‘we’ and ‘one’
for the persons directly involved. There is a speaker and a person addressed by
him, and they both occur in the first line - ‘Let us go then, you and I’. The ‘you’
is addressed explicitly quite often in the first part, and though it looks like an
impersonal ‘you’ in places, the context seems to indicate a definite individual:
T here will be time, there will be tim e
T o p repare a face to m eet the faces th a t you m eet;
T here will be tim e to m urder and create,
A nd tim e for all the w orks and days o f hands
T h at lift and drop a question on y our plate;
In these lines there seems to be a completely generalised ‘you’. But the next
line makes the other person quite distinct:
T im e for you and tim e for me,
Then there is a change. The ‘you’ almost disappears and the ‘I’ seems to
hold the stage alone:
A nd indeed there will be tim e
T o w onder, ‘D o I d a re ? ’ and, ‘D o I d a re ? ’
Kristian Smidt
Prufrock describes himself (‘a bald spot in the middle of my hair’, ‘my morning
coat’, ‘my necktie’) and continues to worry and waver:
I have m easured o u t my life w ith coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
B eneath the m usic from a farther room .
So how should I presum e?
‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws’, ‘I was afraid’, ‘I grow old ... I grow
old . . ‘I have heard the mermaids singing’ - thus it continues, until we are
abruptly switched back to ‘we’ again right at the end.
We must suppose all along, however, that the ‘I ’ goes on addressing the ‘you’
and that his many questions are not merely rhetorical but directed to his unheard interlocutor. We are reminded of the latter in just two instances in the
m iddle part of the poem:
Stretched on the floor, liere beside you and me.
And:
A m ong the porcelain, am ong som e talk o f you and me.
Who are these two ? The title tells us that the speaker is a certain J. Alfred
Prufrock. And since the poem is called a love song, it is natural to suppose
that the shadowy ‘you’, at least after the first verse paragraph, is a woman, the
object of Prufrock’s hesitant and timorous desire.
If we look more closely, however, we shall discover that the woman of the
poem appears under another pronoun, the indefinite ‘one’ w'hich Prufrock
chooses instead of ‘she’ :
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: ‘T h at is not w hat I m eant at all.
T h at is not it, at all.’
And again:
I f one, settling a pillow o r throw ing off a shawl,
A nd turning tow ard the w indow , should say:
‘T h at is not it a t all,
T h at is n o t w hat I m eant, a t all.’
This use o f ‘one’ is so unconventional that it tends to be confusing. The reader’s
first impulse is probably to refer it to Prufrock. But when the necessary mental
adjustm ent has been made the pronoun is recognised as a characteristic indirection of Prufrock’s thought. He imagines, and fears, her possible reaction to any
advance on his part, and he thinks of her as ‘one’ rather than ‘she’ out of sheer
timidity. The indefinite pronoun generalises and desexualises the situation and
so renders it less dangerous to him.
Point of View in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
The ‘you’ in the main part of the poem may conceivably be another pronoun
for the same woman. But since in the beginning o f the poem Prufrock asks a
companion to join him for the visit, and since it is natural to look for consistency
in the use of pronouns unless there are strong reasons not to do so, it is far
more likely th at ‘you’ refers to the same person throughout the poem. And this
person is not the object of Prufrock’s inhibited passion.
Various attem pts have been made to solve the riddle of Prufrock’s interlocutor. The simplest and probably the most satisfactory explanation is that he
is merely the confidant who is needed to make the monologue a dramatic one,
one of the m inor dramatis personae, intrinsically unim portant but useful in giving the m ain character an opportunity to speak. And this interpretation is
supported by Mr. Eliot in the following remarks in a letter to the present writer:
A s fo r T H E L O V E SO N G O F J. A L F R E D P R U F R O C K anything I say now m ust be som ew hat conjectural, as it was w ritten so long ago th at m y m em ory m ay deceive m e; b u t I am
prep ared to assert th a t the ‘y o u ’ in T H E L O V E SO N G is m erely som e friend o r com panion,
presum ably o f the m ale sex, w hom the speaker is a t th a t m om ent addressing, and th a t it has
no em otional c ontent w hatever. I shall be glad if this simplifies the problem , because I have
recently seen som e quite astonishing over-interpretations o f this poem .
This is a timely reminder that we tend nowadays to make even the complex
seem much more complicated than necessary by our search for cryptic meanings.
Eliot’s explanation is authoritative. But it does not, of course, preclude associa­
tions which would give Prufrock’s companion certain recognisable features, and
Eliot would be the last person to discount such associations.
Primarily, the reader can hardly help associating the person spoken to with
himself (or herself), simply because he is addressed all the time. And having
identified himself with the interlocutor he becomes to some extent concerned
in the events of the poem. He certainly cannot help feeling that the ‘you’ is
something more than a sympathetic listener. He is involved with Prufrock in the
latter’s quandary. Prufrock even seems to make a point of this common involvement: ‘Time for you and time for me’, he declares at one point; and, at the
end of the poem:
W e have lingered in the cham bers o f the sea
By sea-girls w reathed w ith seaweed red and brow n
Till hu m an voices wake us, and we drow n.
In these im portant concluding lines where ‘we’ replaces ‘I’ it seems clear that
the companion also has a generalising function, making the experience no
longer merely an individual experience, but raising it to a level at which it symbolises something universal enough to be recognised by any reader capable of
a positive response to the poem.
Kristian Smidt
As for the Prufrock figure, it can hardly be considered irrelevant to our
understanding of the poem to feel that Eliot is present in this creature of his
imagination. The epigraph to The Love Song, from G uido’s confession to Dante
in the Inferno, would in any case prepare us for confidential matters. Certainly
our familiarity with the rest of E liot’s poetry will build up an image of a unique
personality, which, as Eliot has said of Yeats, ‘makes one sit up in excitement
and eagerness to learn more about the author’s mind and feelings’. We gradually learn to distinguish this personality in all or most of Eliot’s works and we
cannot avoid recognising some of the author’s features under the mask of
Prufrock.
Prufrock represents, so to speak, a doubling of the personality. This may
have something to do with the influence of Laforgue. Writing years later in a
Criterion Commentary (April 1933) about the uses of irony, Eliot m entioned
its ‘use (as by Jules Laforgue) to express a dédoublement of the personality
against which the subject struggles’. That kind of ironic struggle is precisely
what I find in The Love Song o f J. Alfred Prufrock.
(There is no need, however, to find the doubling of the personality objectified
as two distinct persons in the two interlocutors of the poem, the ‘I ’ and the
‘you’. To interpret them as the poet and his Psyche in the manner of Poe’s
Ulalume or as two attitudes of mind in the manner of Tennyson’s The Two
Voices is really gratuitous and uninteresting.)
T urning now to La Figlia Che Piange, we find in the first section a somebody
addressing a somebody else, apparently a young man talking to a girl in a gar­
den. The poem must have been partly inspired by literary models, chiefly Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel and D rum m ond’s Madrigall
Like the Idalian Q ueene,
H er H aire a b o u t her Eyne,
while the title of the poem was suggested by the name of a sculptured figure
which Eliot had been told to look for in an Italian museum but failed to find.
In the first part the ‘I ’, or speaker, is understood because of the imperative
verbs to belong to the dramatic scene:
W eave, weave the sunlight in yo u r h air Clasp y our flowers to you w ith a pained surprise -
In the next part a ‘he’ and a ‘she’ also make their appearance:
So I w ould have had him leave,
So I w ould have had her stand and grieve,
Point of View in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
It looks as if an observer - a poet or an artist to judge by his attitude - takes
over in this section, having merely recorded the thoughts of the young man in
the first part and now taking an objective and aesthetic view of the situation.
But then comes a puzzling twist: the ‘I’ of the second section, in other words
the observer, includes himself in a ‘we both’, as if it was really he who had been
present with the girl in the garden:
I should find
Som e way in com parably light and deft,
Som e way we b o th should un d erstan d ,
And in the final section the artist-observer is reminiscing about the girl and the
garden scene, speaking of her again in the third person and this time in the
past tense .
g^e
turnecj aw ay5 b u t
with the au tu m n w eather
C om pelled m y im agination m any days,
There can be no doubt after this that the speakers of the various sections
are the same person, that the artist (or poet) and the young man in the garden
are identical, and that he is speaking of himself as ‘h e’ and ‘him ’ in the middle
section. The revelation of this identity is made in the ‘we both’ and is confirmed
in the last section. Again there is a dédoublement of the personality, still ironical
in spite of the dom inant lyricism of this poem. But the detachment of one char­
acter or attitude from the other, the observer from the agent-sufferer, is incornplete. And there is little attem pt at disguise, unless it is disguise to suggest that
the observer may be a painter. The general effect, therefore, is of something
intermediate between objective description and personal confession. Certainly
we have the effect of something far more significant to the poet than ‘a gesture
and a pose’, the understatem ent by which he sums up the experience. We need
only call to mind the almost pivotal significance of the girl-in-the-flower-garden
image in a great number of E liot’s poems and plays.
The Waste Land begins in the first person plural, with an ‘us’ in the fifth line
which seems to comprise all hum anity:
W inter kept us w arm , covering
E arth in forgetful snow,
Immediately after that, the words ‘Summer surprised us . .. ’ introduce the epi­
sode of the Hofgarten, in which ‘us’ and ‘we’ refer to two individuals, apparently
a man and a woman striking up acquaintance in Munich. That episode is in
turn followed by an unidentified voice addres sing somebody as ‘Son of m an’
and telling h im :
Kristian Smidt
(Com e in under
A nd I will show
Y o u r shadow at
O r y our shadow
the shadow o f this red rock),
you som ething different from either
m orning striding behind you
at evening rising to m eet you;
Then another voice, from Wagner,
M ein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du ?
followed by the ‘hyacinth girP and somebody - again we do not know who speaking to her:
4
,
°
- Yet when we cam e back, late, from the H yacinth garden,
Y our arm s full and your h air wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed,
M adame Sosostris of the next section stands out clearly, but her client is unknown. And in the final section of ‘The Burial of the D ead’ there is again an
anonymous speaker, one who watches the early morning crowd fiowing over
London Bridge and reflects, with Dante, ‘I had not thought death had undone
so m any.’ He meets and speaks to a man called Stetson and ends by calling him
‘You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frére!’ - which perhaps offers
a hint of an explanation. We shall pick this up later.
In ‘A Game o f Chess’, after the initial description of the luxurious dressing
room, there is a dialogue between an anonymous woman and an anonymous
man. Her words are given in quotation m arks,1 whereas his are not, which
seems to indicate that he is the narrator of the incident and that we are invited
to share his prophetic and seemingly despairing point of view:
A nd we shall play a gam e o f chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and w aiting for a knock up o n the door.
After that comes a dram atic monologue in a pub, with the female speaker suffi­
ciently identified by what she says and her way of saying it.
Then ‘The Fire Sermon’, beginning with a mosaic of quotations from the
Psalms, Spenser, Marvell and Shakespeare, each introducing a speaker, and all
the speakers fused in the same ‘I ’ by the juxtaposition of the quotations:
By the w aters o f L em an I sat dow n and wept ...
Sweet T ham es, run softly till I end my song,
But a t m y back in a cold blast I hear
M using upon the king my b ro th e r’s w reck
1. M any editions p rin t a closing q uotation m ark a t the end o f th e line ‘W hat shall I do n o w ?
W hat shall I d o ? ’, thus apparently giving the succeeding lines to a different speaker.
M r.E liot has confirm ed my supposition th at there should be no qu o tatio n m ark in thisplace.
Point of View in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
After the invitation from the Smyrna merchant, again reported by an anonymous narrator, the poem introduces Tiresias, the ancient hermaphrodite and
prophet.
j Tiresias, old m an w ith w rinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest -
And Tiresias having witnessed the episode of the typist and the ‘young man
carbuncular’, the voice is once more that of the observer of life in the City of
London.
The short part called ‘Death by W ater’ concludes with an exhortation to a
universal audience, introducing a ‘you’ which has been absent since the ‘Son of
m an’ section in ‘The Burial of the D ead’ :
G entile o r Jew
O you who tu rn the wheel and look to w indw ard,
C onsider Phlebas, who was once h andsom e and tall as you.
And a ‘we’ which has also been virtually absent since ‘The Burial of the Dead’
is reintroduced in ‘W hat the Thunder Said’, where it assumes a great deal of
im portance: ‘We who were living are now dying’, ‘If there were water we should
stop and drink’, ‘We think of the key, each in his prison’. Mingled with this
there is the voice of the individual speaker using the singular pronoun, frequently addressing an unnam ed companion: ‘Who is the third who walks always beside you?’, ‘My friend, blood shaking my h e a r t. . . ’, ‘The sea was calm,
your heart would have responded’. And last of all another mosaic of quotations
and original lines, mostly in the first person singular.
W ith all this seeming fluctuation in point of view it is surely no exaggeration
to say that much of the obscurity of the poem is due to the use of pronouns
without reference to distinct persons. We have the impression at first of a hubbub of voices all heard in the dark in a strange room. Occasionally the charac­
ters take distinct shapes, in bits of narrative or in dramatic monologues and
dialogues. But more often we are left in doubt as to who the speakers are and
whom they are talking to. And our natural tendency as readers to identify the
speaker with the poet and the persons addressed with ourselves is disturbed by
the frequency w ith which the speaker seems to assume imaginary personalities.
The explanatory note on Tiresias appended to the poem by the author may
give us a certain am ount of help:
T iresias, although a m ere spectator and n o t indeed a ‘ch aracter’, is yet the m ost im p o rtan t
personage in the poem , uniting a ll the rest. Ju st as the one-eyed m erchant, seller o f currants,
m elts into the P hoenician Sailor, and the latter is n o t w holly distinct from F erd in an d Prince
o f N aples, so all the w om en are one w om an, and the two sexes m eet in Tiresias. W h at T hiresias
sees, in faet, is the substance o f the poem .
Kristian Sm idt
I am not sure how literally we should take this explanation or exactly how
much it is capable of explaining. Certainly many of the voices in The Waste
Land can easily be reduced to one voice, or at least one chorus, that of humanity,
conscious of its emptiness and sterility but unable to define it and unable to
cope with it. There is no voice in The Waste Land entirely non-human except
th at of the Thunder, rumbling the words Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata, and
what I take to be the final sound of the rain, ‘Shantih shantih shantih’. But there
is the voice of somebody who is fully conscious of the plight of humanity and
of the nature of that plight, one who has seen ‘fear in a handful of dust’ and has
looked ‘into the heart of light, the silence’, who has grown old with Tiresias
and ‘passed the stages of his age and youth’ with Phlebas the Phoenician, one
who shares the common lot but who sees and knows more than the rest. And
I cannot see that anything is gained by completely merging his voice with the
others. On the contrary, there is a great loss in dram atic tension.
On the one hand, then, there is the observer-prophet and on the other the
bewildered and unhappy inhabitants of the Waste Land.
The hint that was found at the end of ‘The Burial of the Dead’ may now
be reconsidered: ‘You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frére!’ This
would seem to indicate that Eliot is putting both himself and his readers into
the poem, identifying them all with the man in the London crowd (‘Stetson’)
and with humanity in general. We do indeed recognise the prophetic voice of
the poem as that of the poet. In other words, we are right in thinking that the
poet is partly speaking to us and partly to himself in so far as he shares the
common dilemma. Only he chooses to embody himself in various shapes in
order to do so: Baudelaire, the Fisher King, Tiresias, Saint Augustine and so
on. Thus the first and second voices o f poetry structurally carry the whole poem
and constantly emerge on the surface, but they are drowned at times by the
third voice, that of the dramatically conceived characters like Madame Sosostris
and the speakers in the pub.
The Waste Land has for many people come to be the casebook of a particular
generation, the most significant expression of a certain feeling of disillusion and
neurotic boredom in the period after the first W orld War. It will be remembered
that Eliot once rejected that sort of interpretation:
I dislike the w ord ‘g e n era tio n ’, w hich has been a talism an for the last ten years; when I w rote
a poem called The Waste Land som e o f the m ore approving critics said th a t I had expressed
the ‘disillusionm ent o f a g eneration’, w hich is nonsense. 1 m ay have expressed for them their
ow n illusion o f being disillusioned, but th a t d id not form p art o f my intention.
Point of View in T. S. E liot’s Poetry
Eliot seems to have thought that disillusionment was precisely what the inhabitants of modern Europe did not sulfer from - what, indeed, they might
have been all the better for achieving. Human beings may lose one set of illu­
sions, but they quickly acquire others. And Eliot was disinclined to commiserate
with one particular generation, which was perhaps smugly satisfied with its
sense of disillusionment if the truth were known. W hat he depicted was a predicament of modern hum anity more general than that of a generation, a predicament which he had begun to see quite clearly years before the Great W ar
broke out.
Thus it remains true, it seems to me, that in many of his early poems Eliot
wished to portray a common dilemma, a faet which helps to account for the
great number of characters in his poetry, particularly in The Waste Land. But
at the same time the dilemma must undoubtedly have been a private one, judging by the distinctness with which we recognise the ironic voice of the author
in the poems which we have analysed.
Eliot needed to explore his own mind, we may infer, because he found uncertainty and vacillation there. It is also legitimate to conclude that he felt the
need to express his personal emotions. And this in turn necessitated a technique
by which the private could be made public.
In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ Eliot adm itted that private emo­
tions might be intense or painful enough to make it seem necessary to escape
from them - ‘only those who have personality and emotions know what it
means to want to escape from these things’. On the background of this state­
ment his early Impersonal theory seems to indicate a strong - and, for that
m atter, quite reasonable - disinclination to reveal private emotions, emotions
which needed expressing, but the full understanding of which was not for the
general public.
Now, in so far as the poet can change his private agony into something rich
and strange this will no doubt be a gain to his art. The reader can hardly want
to read simply the journal intime of the poet put into verse. But the ‘new art
em otion’ or ‘significant em otion’ which Eliot speaks of can surely be only a
part of the em otional content of a poem. A poem which uses words and deals
with hum an beings or the world in which they live cannot fail to make its appeal
to the common emotions of practical life. N or does the poet do away with his
private emotions by using them to produce an art emotion. The art emotion
may be produced, but the private emotions will still be there if they are strong
Kristian Sm idt
enough to need expressing. It was possibly considerations such as these that
prompted Eliot to revise his Impersonal theory in his Yeats lecture of 1940.
He had by then come to the conclusion that there are
two form s o f im p e rso n a lity : th at which is natu ral to the m ere skilful craftsm an, an d th a t
which is m ore and m ore achieved by the m aturing artist ... T he second im personality is th a t
o f the poet who, o u t o f intense and personal experience, is able to express a general tru th ;
retaining all the particularity o f his experience, to m ake o f it a general sym bol.
He says of Yeats that ‘having been a great craftsman in the first kind, [he] became a great poet in the second’; and the same may perhaps be said of Eliot,
though I imagine that he acquired a good deal of the ‘second impersonality’ at
a quite early stage of his poetic career.
We cannot, nor would Eliot now himself, adopt the mystico-chemical trans­
m utation theory o f ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ as the only explanation
of the Creative process. Such transm utation of private material into art belongs,
if it has any reality, to the achievement of the mature artist. And it is fair to
judge at least some of Eliot’s early poetry as mainly that of the ‘skilful crafts­
m an’. On that level, then, if there is a strong private emotion which the poet does
not wish to reveal as such, a simple and obvious way to depersonalise it is to use
some kind o f mask or disguise, introducing a speaker whose attributes are not
immediately recognisable as those of the poet, or presenting a character in the
third person. Such ludicrous attributes of J. Alfred Prufrock as his name, his
age and his baldness may be regarded under the aspect of depersonalisation, as
parts of a mask covering the poet’s own features. Especialiy the use o f an old
or oldish speaker is frequent in Eliot’s poetry, and in his early poems it is obviously an effective means of making the speaker outwardly unlike himself.
Eliot reminds us in The Three Voices o f Poetry that Ezra Pound was the
disciple of R obert Browning, who called some of his poems Dramatis Personae.
Pound chose the title of Personae, which literally means ‘masks’, for a large
collection of his own poetry. And Eliot, as we know, was at one time the dis­
ciple of Pound.
Even before that discipleship, however, he had written his Portrait o f a Lady,
which contains the lines:
A nd I m ust borrow every changing shape
T o find expression . .. dance, dance
Like a dancing bear,
C ry like a p a rro t, c h atter like an ape.
And perhaps there is a similar feeling in the following lines from The Hollow
Men, of a somewhat later date:
Point of View in T. S. E liot’s Poetry
Let me also w ear
Such deliberate disguises
R a t’s coat, crow skin, crossed staves
ln a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
The many T s of Eliot’s early poems are to some extent deliberate dis­
guises. This makes the obscurity of point of view at times excessive, and it is
further increased by the poet’s effort to fuse the private experience and the
general observation, as in The Waste Land. But there is a special approach to
this kind of poetry which helps to justify the indefiniteness. I mean the approach
of the reader who is willing to co-operate with the poet in finding a meaning
for himself. This approach Eliot not only allows but actively encourages, since
his Impersonal theory makes the meaning of a poem and its ‘art em otion’ as
much the business of the reader to determine as that of the poet. Eliot, who is
more of an Arnoldian than I think he has ever admitted, has carried Matthew
A rnold’s idea of a special kind of poetic truth one step further by saying in
effect that not only truth but meaning, too, is pragmatic - the meaning of a
poem to a particular reader is whatever satisfies that reader most.
Thus our im agination is engaged by the richness of suggestion, so that at
least to some readers the indeterminate point of view will be considered a gain.
They will be content to leave the puzzles unsolved, recognising mainly the
comic and satirical abandon of the poet, which makes his verse vigorous and
fresh in spite of the despondency which seems to be at the bottom of much of it.
I can understand this attitude but do not altogether share it. Considering the
state of mental pressure in which many poems are created and the am ount of
hard work that goes to their making, I am convinced that generally the fullest
satisfaction must be derived when the reader’s understanding-using this word
in a wide sense - approaches as close as possible to the poet’s own. And though
in his ironic and playful exuberance Eliot may at times have introduced lines
and passages simply to tease the reader or jolt him out of his complacency, the
earnestness which pervades even his comic effects will usually prevent the reader
from putting them down to mere caprice.
Almost all the time there is the serious philosophical preoccupation on
Eliot’s part with the question of identity and individuality. This is apparent in
his plays no less than in his poems - the problem of individual identity is a cen­
tral one both in The Dry Salvages and in The Confidential Clerk.
A typical attitude in some - if not all - of the plays is the conception of the
central character as representative of a family or a community and therefore as
Kristian Smidt
embodying both their failings and their hopes. This is particularly conspicuous
in Murder in the Cathedra!, The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party. In The
Family Reunion Agatha is able to enlighten Harry as to his destiny:
It is possible
Y ou are the consciousness o f your unhappy family,
Its bird sent flying through the p u rg ato rial flame.
It is not fortuitous, therefore, that the general pattern of the play should show
us at the beginning a bewildered family group, then individuals fighting out
their conflicts and primarily one individual doing so, and finally the group
again, now with the promise of a new integration by the self-sacrifice of the
protagonist. In the same way Murder in the Cathedral begins and ends with the
Chorus and has in the middle the sermon of the individual Thomas Becket.
W hat the plays do dramatically the poems do grammatically. We noticed
both in The Love Song o f J. Alfred Prufrock and in The Waste Land something
like a progression from ‘we’ to ‘I’ and back to ‘we’. The same progression may
be found in another poem of indeterminate point of view, The Hollow Men. It
may have something to do with the habitual pattern of Eliot’s thinking or with
a tendency to m anipulate the speakers of his poems in a certain dramatic
rhythm. In either case what is suggested is a dram a of the individual identifying
him self with a group and vicariously acting or atoning for it. Naturally the
point of view cannot in such cases be fixed with precision. It fluctuates all the
time as the process of identification advances and recedes, or is welcomed and
repudiated by those concerned. And it is in the living flux of his feelings as a
distinct individual and as a representative of humanity that Eliot wrote his
poetry.
It is interesting to note that as his philosophical certainty increased the point
of view in his poetry became correspondingly stable. Thus in Ash-Wednesday
the point of view is still a little ambiguous, but the features of the poet are definitely emerging more distinctly. And the Four Quartets, difficult as they may
be in their use of imagery and in the development of their thought, do seem to
contain a quite simple poet-reader relationship, which is of course revealed
most clearly in prosaic passages like:
Y ou say I am repeating
Som ething I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again?
Thus, in the most recent phase of his poetic career, Eliot appears to have given
up his Impersonal theory and his technique of concealment almost entirely.
Point of View in T. S. Eliot's Poetry
When the private predicament ceased his poetry changed. Now that he has a
governing point of view in private life he distinguishes clearly between the
three voices of poetry, speaking distinctly in his own character in his poems and
(with some exceptions, notably in The Cocktail Party) creating clear-cut dram a­
tic characters in his plays.
In his early work, the mingling of lyrical and dramatic elements is one
aspect of the lack of clarity in point o f view. But at the cost of this clarity
lyricism and dram a have certainly been fused into a stirring union. And since
we are dealing with poetry and not with confession or history, it would be invidious to complain that the cost was too great.