This latter formulation rings with automatism, and is steeped in the logic of stimulus and response. Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane, Modernism: 1890-1930, Viking Press, 1991. Learn more. Eliot writes that Pater's literary theory, which is the opposite of Eliot's own authoritative and classical theory, lacks a permanent moral and philosophical basis. One may regret, for example, his sponsorship of Lancelot Andrewes and consider that the Bishop's quaintly allusive pietism is inferior to the baroque eloquence of John Donne. Nor does it really embrace the past worlds with which Mr. Eliot is so sympathetic: Dantean Europe or Jacobean England. There is the dogmatism of science (the comfort of limiting reality and its mastery to problems of mechanics and addition); there is the dogmatism of cynical despair (the comfort of giving up hope and therefore struggle); there is the dogmatism of a pseudo-Marxian dialectic (the comfort of explaining the human tragedy in terms solely of a simple, solvable class struggle). This method of analyzing a piece of literature in its proper context creates a new standard for what should be considered beautiful art, an important suggested guideline for the thinking of a generation of artists (to which many adhered and against which many revolted). For if such a project of fitting together hierarchies of emotion and adequate vehicles of form could be undertaken and achieved once and for all, adequation would cease to be a dilemma and the very task and endeavor of art—"the fight to recover what has been lost/And found and lost again and again" would at a stroke be subverted, indeed disappear forever. (April 8, 2021). Also, this extracting what is of secular value assumes that Eliot took a clear stance on the issue throughout his life; and as the long span of Selected Essays, 1917-1932 shows, he changes his mind on even the most basic of his principles during the fifteen-year period (during which time, notably, Eliot becomes increasingly religious). And a distinct point of view Eliot has. On the contrary, words are symbols which cannot "be … arbitrarily amputated from the object … [they] symbolize," for "[n]o symbol … is ever a mere symbol, but is continuous with that which it symbolizes." First, Eliot was an American who had recently been baptized into the Church of England and who found it extremely important to sound civilized, learned, and authoritative in the grand role he had assigned himself. How far this abstention has been deliberate is a problem both fascinating and hard to solve. Bound with a complex argument for a new theory and laced with allusions to almost every period of literary history, Selected Essays, 1917-1932 may seem inaccessible or perhaps intended only for stuffy academics. It is important to employ the book as a means for seeing the man whole; and, having done so, to deduce a measure of his values as a leader and thereby a measure of the time which took him as a leader. Included here are what Eliot considered the best essays … Arthur Waugh's "The New Poetry" called his poems "un-metrical, incoherent banalities" with "no steady current of ideas behind them." In fact, it is difficult to appreciate Eliot's criticism of a single work without understanding his greater concept of the purpose of Western literature. Essays on novelists like Dickens or poets like Marvell are few and tend not to place their subjects on the same level as a dramatic poet like Shakespeare. Although Ezra Pound and a few other radicals were supportive from the start, critics tended to resent or ignore the early essays anthologized in Selected Essays, 1917-1932. [1] It was published in 1932 by his employers, Faber & Faber, costing 12/6 (2009: £31). full navy cloth gilt title on spine. Eliot calls Dante the most "universal" of poets because his poetry has "peculiar lucidity" (a clear and transparent beauty) and his philosophy has the benefit of a united cultural belief (influenced by St. Thomas Aquinas). All that Whibley was not, Eliot is. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. Selected Essays, 1917-1932 engages in a subtle and complex form of argument that can be called "circuitous," or roundabout and even indirect. With religion thus split, fragmented, open to the eddying currents of individual feeling, it becomes possible to install, in the place of dogma, either "Morals" or "Art." By the time we reach Eliot's famous dyad of essays about "baffled emotion"—"Hamlet and His Problems" and "Ben Jonson"—we are fully habituated to his speculative and generalizing terms, to the origins and central concerns of his argument. But then, by a process of logic that fills Eliot with awe, Pascal comes to recognize that "if certain emotional states … are inherently and by inspection known to be good, then the satisfactory explanation of the world"—the adequate explanation—"must be an explanation which will admit the 'reality' of these values." It is a good place to begin an in-depth analysis of various themes in Selected Essays. "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art," says Eliot, "is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." In fact, it is probably the most important non-Christian generalization to extract from Eliot's criticism. "Selected Essays, 1917-1932 Such an extraction, which is consistent with the idea that a poet exists as a catalyst and not a conscious thinker about philosophical problems, has had visible effects on critical thought of all religious bases. EMBED (for wordpress.com hosted blogs and archive.org item tags) Want more? Selected Essays, 1917–1932 and millions of other books are available for Amazon Kindle. These words echo and reecho themselves, catch up and pattern a multitude of disparate writers and situations into a common design, often amplifying each word's latent suggestivity in a variety of subject-matters (the comparative merit of specimens of poetry drawn from successive ages, or the contemporary dispute over humanism and religion, or disquisitions on education, sociology and the passing of the music hall era) until, almost without warning, each essay becomes but a particular, almost subordinate illustration of the more general, more critically important set of meanings, which it is Eliot's underlying aim to communicate. But in our age, where stability has foundered into chaos, and where the need for spiritual growth has become absolutely identified with the bare struggle for survival, the discrepancy between a man like Mr. Eliot and adequate leadership becomes enormous. It comes across as wholly invalid in a universe of process, and untrue to the underlying drift of Eliot's thought as we have followed it thus far. Arnold (1822-1888) was one of the most important critics and advocates for "culture" (arts and humanities, particularly literature) in Victorian England. Victorian literature is also characterized, however, by the growing counterculture that exploded in the 1890s. Books › Literature & Fiction › Essays & Correspondence Share