Abstract
Looking at Eliot’s one published prose poem, ‘Hysteria’, this essay argues its centrality to the emergence of the form as an undecided and self-conscious twentieth-century genre. Eliot considered prose an artistic medium as complex as verse and, also, as the vehicle of thought. The first idea came to him from vers libre; the second, from the longstanding idea of prose as the manifestation of a cogent individuality—a clarified demonstration of the rounded literary intelligence. Bonamy Dobrée published Modern Prose Style in 1934 and Herbert Read’s English Prose Style appeared in 1946: as editor of The Criterion, Eliot worked with both. I look at these works, his unpublished prose poems, and scrutinise the rhythm and syntax of ‘Hysteria’ with this double-minded view of prose in mind.
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Notes
- 1.
T.S. Eliot , “Reflections on Vers Libre,” New Statesman 8 (March 3, 1917): 518–19; repr. in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot , ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), 34–35.
- 2.
T.S. Eliot , Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1999), 17.
- 3.
Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis (London: Faber, 2000), 270.
- 4.
Eliot, “The Borderline of Prose,” New Statesman 9 (19 May 1917): 158.
- 5.
Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 2002), 24.
- 6.
Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. C. Ricks (San Diego, New York, and London: Harvest, 1998), 56.
- 7.
Martin Scofield , T.S. Eliot : The Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 67.
- 8.
Charles Baudelaire , “To Arsène Houssaye,” dedication of Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen), trans. Louise Varèse, ix–x.
- 9.
‘Poet and Saint…’, Dial 82 (May 1927), 427; cited by Ronald Schuchard in Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14.
- 10.
I draw here on pages 48–49 of Murphy’s A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). Lyndall Gordon makes this remark in Eliot’s Early Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 19.
- 11.
These poems can be found in Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, 60, 90.
- 12.
Ibid., 90 (the poem) and 290 (Ricks’s note).
- 13.
See, for example, Saintsbury on ‘‘pure prose highly rhythmed,’’ in A History of English Prose Rhythm (London and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 344.
- 14.
Bonamy Dobrée , Modern Prose Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 11.
- 15.
Jason Hardin, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 109.
- 16.
Herbert Read, English Prose Style (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1946), 10, 26, 28, 34.
- 17.
Sewanee Review (January–March 1966), 46–47; cited by Harding in The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks, 109.
- 18.
Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962, 69, 190.
- 19.
Paul Valéry The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), xvi.
- 20.
“Lancelot Andrewes” (1926), Selected Essays, 341, 346.
- 21.
Denis Donoghue, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 50.
Works Cited
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Donoghue, Denis. Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000.
Eliot, T.S. “The Borderline of Prose,” New Statesman 9 (May 19, 1917): 158.
———. The Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode. London: Faber, 1975.
———. Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, edited by Christopher Ricks. San Diego, New York, and London: Harvest, 1998.
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———. Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber, 2002.
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Harding, Jason. The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Murphy, Marguerite. A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
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Saintsbury, George. A History of English Prose Rhythm. London and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965.
Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Scofield, Martin. T.S. Eliot: The Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Valéry, Paul. The Art of Poetry. Translated by Denise Folliot. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958.
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Ravinthiran, V. (2018). T.S. Eliot’s Prose (Poetry). In: Monson, J. (eds) British Prose Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77863-1_8
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