It is a half-heard magic speech from a hidden speaker
Sounding through light and rain.

IV

Men with the vision of air went planning and building;
They dreamed of slaves of iron and wrought their slaves;
They envied the wind and the eagle and spread their wings
Above the shadow of sinking woods and waves.
Men made little suns for the midnight's gilding,
Bridged with their wires the bridgeless gap of seas;
They dulled the teeth of winter, they turned the stings
And withering of disease-

V

Men with the dream of air have climbed to their vision,
But now they are faint for the meat of a day gone by;
The steeds of the sun race on in a golden madness,
The hurtling drivers are pale in the height of the sky.
Some say: "Hard Fate in a wrath and a great derision
Has laid the tools of gods in the hands of men;
Can dust breed stars? Can tears be distilled to gladness?
Let us go to earth again!"

VI

But the many hear not, the millions follow their dreaming
Driving their iron cattle on stone or steel,

Flying their iron hawks on an airy ocean,

Bearing children that play with the spark and the wheel.
They will never turn from swiftness and silver gleaming
Or the sense that he who has taken in wheel or rod
The staff of gods and the magic of god-like motion
Himself shall become a god.

VII

Perhaps they will come again to the sun and the bough,

The wind and the clod that once were their strife and their fare;

They will take not of olden beauty or olden toil;

They will only come back to earth when earth is air:

When they girdle peaks with their pavements and send their plow

Like a whirl of wind, and store their snow and their sun,
And sow where the strength they have sifted into the soil
Yields five instead of one.

VIII

Look back, then, you who had love for earth and regret her,
And mourn a change that harries your hill and sky;

For men are turned from the peace of the scythe and candle;
Their eyes are fierce for the bright and the swift and the high.
They have wrecked a world for the leaping dream of a better,
And
gone from peace toward a peace beyond a war,
They have mounted untrodden stairs to a key and a handle
That open a door.

UPPER AIR

High, pale, imperial places of slow cloud
And windless wells of sunlit silence. ... Sense
Of some aware, half-scornful Permanence
Past which we flow like water that is loud
A moment on the granite. Nothing here
Beats with the pulse that beat in us below;
That was a flame; this is the soul of snow
Immortalized in moveless atmosphere.

Yet we shall brood upon this haunt of wings
When love, like perfume washed away in rain,
Dies on the years. Still we shall come again,
Seeking the clouds as we have sought the sea,
Asking the peace of these immortal things.
That will not mix with our mortality.

THO

T. S. Eliot

HOMAS STEARNS ELIOT was born in St. Louis, Missouri, September 26, 1888. He received his A.B. at Harvard, 1909, and his A.M., 1910. Subsequently, he studied at the Sorbonne and at Merton College, Oxford. In 1914 he settled in London where he became a teacher, lecturer, editor, and publisher. In 1927 he became a naturalized British subject and declared that he was "Anglo-Catholic in religion, royalist in politics, and classicist in literature."

Prufrock appeared in England in 1917. An American edition, including a number of other verses, was published under the title Poems in 1920. It was hailed, reviled, applauded, misunderstood, and imitated. There were indeed many imitators, particularly in England, where the younger men, rebounding from the affected simplicity of the Georgians, seized upon Eliot's disillusioned subtleties as a new gospel. Most of them patterned their lines upon the now famous "Sweeney" model, and by 1922 Eliot was one of the most discussed and disputed of living American poets. This early work reveals two sharply differentiated idioms. The more arresting inflection is in the impressionistic sets of quatrains that compose "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," "The Hippopotamus," "Burbank with a Baedeker." It is a witty if recondite inflection which is heard beneath the muffled allusions; the edged lines crackle with observations as shrewd as "the snarled and yelping seas," "this oval O cropped out with teeth," "laughter tinkling among the teacups," "the damp souls of housemaids." Occasionally Eliot's wit takes on a darker intensity; speaking of Donne's struggle to transcend the senses, he writes:

He knew the anguish of the marrow,

The ague of the skeleton;

No contact possible of flesh

Allayed the fever of the bone.

But there is another phase of Eliot, one that is disclosed in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the "Portrait of a Lady," and "La Figlia Che Piange," in which picture, philosophy, and music are surprisingly blended. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," written while Eliot was still at Harvard, is a minor masterpiece; nothing in recent poetry (if we forget Laforgue and the other French poets to whom Eliot is manifestly indebted), nothing in English since the seventeenth century metaphysicals, has communicated so great a sense of ambiguous hurt and general frustration.

First and last Eliot represents a revolt from the "cheerfulness, optimism, and hopefulness" of the nineteenth century; his work is an implicit declaration that poetry must not only "be found through suffering, but can find its material only in suffering." Beauty itself is suspect in the modern world; Eliot insists that the poet should "be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory." In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" Eliot shows the boredom and the horror, if not the glory, in contemporary society. The prematurely old Prufrock is a dilettante, culture-ridden and world-weary, aloof and disillusioned. He is inhibited by his own distorted memory and his confused desires; he recognizes passion, but he cannot rise to it. His isolation is emphasized by the strange opening simile (“when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon the table") with its mood of sick helplessness, and by the introductory lines from Dante's Inferno: “If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this frame should shake no more; but since, if what I hear be true, none ever did return alive from this depth, without fear of infamy I answer thee."

Equally precise in its hyperesthetic delicacy is the "Portrait of a Lady," an analytical study of the feminine dilettante, the faded votary of dimly lit studios-a baffled précieuse diffusing small talk and boredom. In these poems Eliot becomes the laureate of nostalgia, of dwindling hope and universal purposelessness.

More important than Eliot's philosophy is his technique. It is a fascinating mixture of statement and suggestion, of passion and wit, of fact and symbol: the first extended use in English of the Symbolist method. The method, as Edmund Wilson showed in his valuable study Axel's Castle, is the result of an anti-scientific, romantic escapism; it consists chiefly in approximating the "indefiniteness of music," mingling "the grand and prosaic manners," and, generally, avoiding plain statements in favor of intimations. Instead of seeking the "jewel-like phrase" with its finality of definition, the Symbolists attempt to communicate "states of feeling." Eliot carries the method further by communicating-or at least registering-states of feeling that are complicated and highly personal. To achieve this he employs a complex verse, combining trivial and tawdry pictures with traditionally poetic subject-matter, linking the banalities of conversation to rich rhetoric, and interrupting the present with flash-backs of the past. This method, not unfamiliar to students of the films, makes for a nervous disintegration; the rapid and, seemingly, unrelated images, the discordant metaphors achieve an emotional response at the expense of a logical progression. But logic is not the objective. The reader is carried on by the rapidity of suggestions, by the swiftly accumulating ideas and echoes, chiefly by the play of cultural associations.

The contrast of the beautiful past with the repulsive present, the degradation

of everything which enlarges the spirit, is given full scope in Eliot's The Waste Land. The Waste Land (1922) is Eliot's attempt to sound his favorite themethe disillusion-frustration motif-on a major scale. The publication of this fortypage poem caused an outburst so violent and prolonged that the echoes of the controversy hung in the air for several years. On the one hand it was dismissed as "an impudent hoax," "filthy bedlam raving”; on the other it was exalted as "the greatest document of our day, showing the starvation of our entire civilization.” The Waste Land is neither "erudite gibberish" nor is it "a great work, with one triumph after another." It is, in essence, a set of mangled, difficult, and (in spite of the arbitrary program of unification) separate failures and solitary successes. If its pages are splintered with broken phrases and distorted pictures, one must remember that Eliot is attempting to portray disintegration itself. Its dependence on associations in other literature makes it seem like an anthology of assimilations; its jumble of quotations (without inverted commas) from thirty-one sources gives the entire structure the look of a piece of literary carpentry; its allusiveness frantically attempts to connect the favorite myths of all time. It does, however, present a double picture: the cross-section of a tortured mind and the image of an arid world. Its sense of sterility, its refusal to face the growing complexity of the age was so significant-and so appealing to the escapists—that it became a term which characterized a period.

Eliot's influence was felt on both sides of the Atlantic. The younger poets repudiated his inverted romanticism masked as classicism, and his pessimism which scarcely troubled to conceal the death-wish, but they were fascinated by his technique. They scorned Eliot's withdrawal into Anglo-Catholicism, but they admired -and imitated-his power of suggestion. In England W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis acknowledged his influence; in America his poetry affected the work of Conrad Aiken, Archibald MacLeish, and Horace Gregory, among others.

In his turn, Eliot was strongly influenced by his "ancestors" in France. Reviewing Peter Quennell's Baudelaire and the Symbolists in 1930 he referred to Arthur Symons' Symbolist Movement in Literature, saying, "I myself owe Mr. Symons a great debt. But for having read his book I should not, in the year 1908, have heard of Laforgue and Rimbaud; I should probably not have begun to read Verlaine; and but for reading Verlaine, I should not have heard of Corbière. So the Symons book is one of those which have affected the course of my life." But, as Edmund Wilson points out, though Eliot's main theme (the inferiority of the present to the past) is found in Laforgue and the other Romantics, though the idea of juxtaposing many literatures and a medley of idioms was suggested by Ezra Pound, “yet Eliot manages to be more effective precisely where he might be expected to be least original-he succeeds in conveying his meanings, in communicating his emotions, in spite of all his learning or mysterious allusions, and whether we understand them or not. . . . He has been able to lend even to the rhythms, to the words themselves, of his great predecessors a new music and a new meaning.” His borrowings are a proof of Eliot's retreat to the safety of literature; scholars have been surprised (and sometimes a little pained) to find many of Eliot's phrases not only in the minor Elizabethans, but (as Elizabeth Jackson discovered) in so curious a modern writer as Conan Doyle. The very "mottoes"

or epigraphs are intended not only to comment upon the poems which they introduce, but to amplify their suggestiveness. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is prefaced by a quotation from Dante emphasizing the repressed Prufrock's ultra-fastidious and isolated spirit; "Burbank with a Baedeker" is set off by the preceding jumble of phrases from Shakespeare, Browning, and Henry James referring to Venice; the quotation "Mistah Kurtz-he dead" from Conrad's Heart of Darkness intensifies the sense of loss and emptiness rising from the lines which follow-as F. O. Matthiessen remarks, it "epitomizes in a sentence the very tone of blasphemous hopelessness which issues from "The Hollow Men.'" In "The Hollow Men," which emphasizes the barrenness of The Waste Land, Eliot reached a dead end of doubt. "The Hollow Men" pictures a world exhausted -"shape without form, shade without color, paralyzed force, gesture without motion." Men gather on stony soil in a "valley of dying stars." They lean together, lacking initiative. They are without vision; they grope without thought. The confusion is intensified by the juxtaposition of a distorted nursery rhyme and a fragment from the Lord's Prayer. The finale completes the despair. Civilization, having lost its ideals and religion, has reached an impasse; man cannot even die heroically. The world ends not with a bang, but with a whimper.

After "The Hollow Men" Eliot, finding he could proceed no further with doubt, turned to faith. Ash Wednesday (1930), The Rock: a Pageant Play (1934), and Murder in the Cathedral (1935) express a hopefulness which Eliot's earlier poems repudiated. The Family Reunion (1939) is a drama in verse, the theme of which is the persistent sense of sin; the setting is contemporary, although the Eumenides appear in person. Eliot accepts the Christian religion and, beneath the austerity of the later work, sounds a compassion which is genuine and moving. Critics were particularly enthusiastic concerning Ash Wednesday, which begins in desperation, rises on hope, and rests in peaceful resignation. Here, said Edwin Muir, Eliot passes "from a historical conception of society to a religious one, or rather to that society within society in which he sees man's sole hope of salvation. A church is the only kind of institution in which the individual can hold communion not only with the living (the ideal of the Socialist and the Communist), but with the dead as well; and so membership of a church was perfectly consonant with Eliot's view of life and his development as à poet. Ash Wednesday is one of the most moving poems he has written, and perhaps the most perfect."

Murder in the Cathedral (1935), a dramatization of the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170, was written for production at the Canterbury Festival in 1935. The language is lucid, the action straightforward, and the poetry almost wholly free of the obliquity and harsh juxtaposition with which Eliot shocked an epoch out of its exhausted sentiments and offered new symbols for a new generation. Instead of a confusion of private references and literary allusions the verse has a simple unity, and the choruses are not only skillfully balanced but eloquent. The play was successfully produced in New York by the Federal Theater Project in 1938.

Collected Poems: 1907-1935 appeared in 1936. It comprehensively reveals Eliot struggling through his nightmares of vulgarity, crying aloud in an endless cactus land, and finally reaching his spiritual haven. Again the critics were divided. "Reading Eliot's new poems," wrote Malcolm Cowley, "was like excavating