Eliot and the Ghost of Poe

Abstract

Of the chance of Poe’s influence on him, T. S. Eliot professed himself unsure: ‘one cannot be sure’, he said, ‘that one’s own writing has not been influenced by Poe’.¹ The whole character of Poe’s effect on Eliot’s poetry, the pressure of a ghost, is bodied forth in this remark. Had any critic but Eliot made it, the title of the essay it comes from could have been ‘From Poe to Eliot’ instead of ‘From Poe to Valéry’; for on the score of influencing Symbolist poetry and theory Poe can be claimed for the tradition in which the early Eliot worked largely — and is that not derivatively an ‘influence’? But by influence Eliot meant something stricter. In ‘From Poe to Valéry’ he appears in harmony with the poetic philosophy and practice of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry, and with their view of Poe, even while hinting that his own demands for poetry have transcended, without repudiating, theirs. Implicit is Poe’s presence in the tradition. But evident is the doubt whether, in Eliot’s poetry, Poe ever performed a shaping function, one going beyond his usefulness to poets intermediate in time. I would argue that he did indeed exercise such a function, but with a singular anonymity and unobtrusiveness.