‘CLASSICAL AUTHORITY’ AND ‘THE DARK EMBRYO’: A DICHOTOMY IN T. S. ELIOT’S CRITICISM

IN 1923 T. S. Eliot wrote that the difference between Classicism and Romanticism was 'the difference between the complete and the fragmentary. the adult and the immature. the orderly and the chaotic'.l Five years later he described his 'general point of view' as 'Classicist in literature'.2 And for at least two decades after that, Eliot's critics obediently referred to him as a 'Classicist'. As late as 1954 we find D. E. S. Maxwell speaking of Eliot as 'the supreme example of the modem classicist'.3 I propose to investigate this term by looking at those parts of Eliot's criticism in which his own experience of poetic composition is described or implied. I choose that area, first, because it is one in which a poet is likely to speak most directly and personally; and second. because it is one in which we have some chance of distinguishing between the 'Romantic' and the 'Classicist' poet, and of agreeing on the distinction-the Romantic being commonly marked out by his willingness to acknowledge a spontaneous or 'inspirational' element in a process which the Classicist prefers should be a responsible and controlled verbal exercise. Thus. for example, where Maxwell refers to Eliot's 'Classicism' he also stresses the poet's conscious control over the poem as it is written. He speaks of Eliot's 'intellectual rather than instinctive emotional approach to the construction of the poem's form ... [and] to the task of selecting words ... '.~ Similarly where Eliot declares his own 'Classicism' in 'The Function of Criticism', we find him insisting upon 'external authority' in literature and life, rejecting what Middleton Murry had called 'the inner voice' as a guide to poetic or to general conduct, and, most important, emphasizing 'the critical labour', 'the frightful toil' of poetic composition.s 'There is a tendency', Eliot says, 'and I think it is a whiggery tendency, to decry this critical toil of the artist; to propound the thesis that the great artist is an unconscious artist . . .' And he goes on with heavy irony to confess his own lack of 'inspiration' and of 'oracular expertness'.