Abstract
Most people recognise that however genuine was Eliot’s admiration for many aspects of Blake’s work, this is probably outweighed by the powerful and trenchantly expressed reservations. In this connection, almost as interesting as what Eliot has to say about Blake is the fact that he chose to say it and then to give his thoughts further prominence in The Sacred Wood (1920) alongside such innovative theoretical essays as ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ or ‘Hamlet and his Problems’. Like all Eliot’s critical work in this period (these essays were written between 1917 and 1920), this piece has a strategic aspect. Eliot, with studied disingenuousness, dismisses the idea that Blake is merely ‘a wild pet for the supercultivated’, thereby recognising part of the threat posed by Blake’s influence while suggesting one way in which he is going to deflect it (not at all dishonestly, of course).1 What is good about Blake is going to be shown to derive from his hospitality to ‘the impersonality of the artistic process’ — that famous and highly significant phrase from ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. At first it might not seem as if this were really the case, for Eliot’s first piece of concessive praise is formed from the idea of Blake’s ‘peculiar honesty’ which is ‘peculiarly terrifying’ (SW, 151). One might be tempted to interpret this concession as going all the way in incorporating Eliot among those who look to poetry for the expression of truth and sincerity.
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Notes
T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1960; reprint of 2nd edn 1928), 151.
T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Faber, 1996), xxvii.
David Goldie, A Critical Difference: T S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1919–1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 81.
T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 2nd edn (London: Faber, 1964; 1st edn 1933.), 140.
W. B. Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds (London: John Lane, 1899), see notes 65–108.
W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), 114.
David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, newly rev. edn (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 99.
T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber, 1969), 70.
Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (London: Faber, 1978), 85.
Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and the Occult (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993).
Bernard Bergonzi, ‘Eliot’s Cities’, T S. Eliot at the Turn of the Century, ed. Marianne Thormählen (Lund: Lund University Press, 1994), 59–76 (p. 61).
Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T S. Eliot (London: Methuen, 1965; 1st edn 1959), 110.
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Mysticism of William Blake’, The Nation & Athenaeum (17 September 1927), 779.
William Blake, ‘Illustrations of the Book of Job’, IX (1825). Repr., in Blake’s Job: A Commentary, ed. Andrew Wright (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 26.
J. Middleton Murry, William Blake (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936; 1st edn 1933), 17, 269.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 14, 15.
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© 2006 Edward Larrissy
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Larrissy, E. (2006). Eliot Between Blake and Yeats. In: Blake and Modern Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627444_3
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