Abstract
When in 1930 T. S. Eliot wrote that “words like emergent, organism, biological unity of life, simply do not arouse the right ‘response’ in my breast,” he was complaining about the organicist terminology employed by humanists like J. Middleton Murry and I. A. Richards.1 Eliot’s complaint, however, is peevish; his own criticism employs precisely that organicist vocabulary, adjusted only by a disclaimer of Murry’s or Richard’s pretensions (the occasion for Eliot’s irritation was the appearance of Murry’s God: Being an Introduction to the Science of Metabiology). Indeed, Eliot’s vocabulary of intimacy — the response in his breast — reveals his habitual critical disposition owes much to the Romantic heritage. Eliot’s work reflects, particularly, the approach of Coleridge’s Shakespeare criticism, from which this essay’s title is drawn. That fact has been notecl by many, including Harold Bloom and M. H. Abrams. George Bornstein, and Edward Lobb have discussed Eliot and Coleridge in detail, and a recent book by Carlos Baker, The Echoing Green (1984), testifies to the longterm importance of this connection between Romanticism and Modernism.
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Notes
T. S. Eliot, A Review of God: Being an Introduction to the Science of Metabiology, by J. Middleton Murry, Criterion 9, 335 (January, 1930).
Carlos Baker, The Echoing Green: Romanticism, Modernism, and the Phenomena of Transference in Poetry (Princeton University Press, 1984).
Ronald Schuchard, “Eliot and Hulme in 1916: Toward a Revaluation of Eliot’s Critical and Spiritual Development,” PMLA 88, 1083–94 (Oct. 1973).
Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), 35, 43–4 and passim.
Murray Krieger, “The Existential Basis of Contextual Criticism,” Criticism 8, (iv) (Fall, 1966).
T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), p. 115.
George Bornstein, Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976), 159 and passim.
Edward Lobb, T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). Lobb carefully defines the ground of his argument, excluding metaphysical questions, altogether, but in two appendices, “Eliot, Pound and Modernist Criticism,” and “Eliot and Philosophical Aesthetics,” he confronts the unavoidable as an afterthought.
Immanuel Kant, Werke (ed. Karl Vorlander, et al.) in Philosophischen Bibliothek, IV, pp. 14 ff. See also Kant’s introduction to his Logik.
S. T. Coleridge, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher: Notes and Lectures, new ed. (Liverpool: Edward Howell, 1874), pp. 54–5.
S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: Dent, 1956), p. 167.
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 169.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal entry of June 1838, in Joel Porte, ed., Emerson in His Journals (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 187–8.
Ibid., pp. 370–1; June 1847.
William James, The Principles of Psychology, The Great Books, vol 53 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, Inc., 1952; orig. pub. 1890), 851, 886.
Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New Directions, 1960; orig. pub. 1934), 17.
Catherine Deleuze, “Rhizome,” in Catherine Deleuze (ed.), On the Line, an EMLA Conference Publication (New York: Semiotext (e), Inc., 1983).
Jonathan Culler, “The Mirror Stage,” in Lawrence Lipking (ed.), High Romantic Argument: Essays for M. H. Abrams (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 152.
Ibid., p. 154.
M. H. Abrams, “A Reply,” in Lipking, High Romantic Argument, p. 169.
Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968; orig. pub. 1954), 11–12.
Martin Heidegger, Erläuterung zu Hölderlin’s Dichtung (Frankfurt, 1944), 35 ff.
Hazard Adams, Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1983), 262 ff., 392, 272.
George Santayana, The Birth of Reason and Other Essays (Daniel Cory, ed.) (Columbia University Press, 1968), 45.
Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper, 1957), 43.
Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1946), 34.
T. S. Eliot, “Poetry and Propaganda,” in Morton Dauwen Zabel (ed.), Literary Opinion in America, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Bros., 1957; orig. pub. 1937), 106.
T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950), 285.
Biographia Literaria, Ch. 13.
T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (London: Kegan Paul, 1924), 149.
Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance, rev. ed. (New Directions, 1953), 222, 93, 7.
Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 122.
T. S. Eliot, “Was there a Scottish Literature?” Athenaeum 1 Aug. 1919: 680.
On Poetry and Poets, 15, 122.
T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Transit of Venus, by Harry Crosby (Paris: The Black Sun Press, 1931), v.
T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1933), 139.
T. S. Eliot, “Commentary,” Criterion 4 (Jan. 1927): 5.
On Poetry and Poets, 55, 249; my italics. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 27.
Eliot, Selected Essays, 170, 179.
T. S. Eliot, “A Commentary: That Poetry Is Made with Words,” The New English Weekly 15 (April 27, 1939): 27.
Eliot, Selected Essays, 358.
On Poetry and Poets, 108, 137.
Ibid., 124. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Why Write?” in his What Is Literature (1949), trans. Bernard Frechtman, repr. in Hazard Adams (ed.), Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), 1059.
T. S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 61.
William J. Handy, Kant and the Southern New Critics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 17, passim.
John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 142.
Harvey Seymour Gross, The Contrived Corridor: History and Fatality in Modern Literature (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1971).
The World’s Body, 238–40, 128.
Allen Tate, Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 213, 83 ff.
Robert Penn Warren, “Pure and Impure Poetry,” delivered as one of the Mesures lectures at Princeton in 1942. Repr. in John Crowe Ransom (ed.), The Kenyon Critics: Studies in Modern Literature from the Kenyon Review (New. York: The World Publishing Co., 1951), 17, 38.
Ibid.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1911), 178, 128, 251.
Paul Douglass, “The Gold Coin: Bergsonian Intuition and Modernist Aesthetics,” Thought 58, 234–250 (June ‘83).
Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 16–17.
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 133.
M. L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall, The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1983), 6–7, 10, 17.
Ibid., 15, 10; my italics.
David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1976), 128–9.
Eliot, Introduction to Transit of Venus, vii–viii; my italics.
T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), 96.
On Poetry and Poets, 73.
Abrams, “A Reply,” 171–2.
Pound, ABC of Reading, 29.
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Douglass, P. (1987). “Such as the Life is, Such is the Form”: Organicism among the Moderns. In: Burwick, F. (eds) Approaches to Organic Form. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 105. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3917-2_9
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