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ABSTRACT

WALT WHITMAN, T. S. ELIOT, AND THE
DILEMMA OF MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS

BY

Richard Earl Koch

The poetry of Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot has
often been viewed as if these writers were at opposite ends
of the spectrum of modern poetry. Because they are prob-
ably the central poets of the modern age, their apparent
opposition is particularly important. This study suggests
that the major poems of Whitman and Eliot are very differ-
ent from one another, but also that at their most profound
level Whitman and Eliot were engaged in a complementary way
in the same search for understanding. And finally, this
study suggests that together Whitman and Eliot point toward
a way of seeing the world that might move us as a society
beyond some of our fundamental philosophical dilemmas.

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" by Whitman and "Gerontion"
by Eliot are two representative poems which when viewed to-
gether, raise central questions about the differences and

similarities in the poetry of the two writers. The

Richard Earl Koch

differences in the two poems seem at first to be a dis-
agreement about what language can accomplish. Whitman
claims language can transcend space and time in "Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry," and the speaker of Eliot's "Gerontion"
suggests that neither his senses nor language can find mean-
ing in the world or make meaningful contact with other peo-
ple. We seem to have a somewhat different relationship
with the pggt_of "Gerontion" than we have with the speaker
in the poem, however, which raises the question again about
how different the two poets really are. This question and
the question about what language can do can be pursued both
into the history of language and further into the major
poetry of Whitman and Eliot.

Owen Barfield is concerned with the history of
meanings of words in poetry and in daily speech. And on
several fundamental issues raised by the study of language
Barfield is clearly allied with Ernst Cassirer. Both
Barfield and Cassirer believe that the fact that language

tends to become more and more figurative (more metaphorical)

 

as we trace it back suggests that language had figurative
beginnings. And they believe that these figurative begin-
nings suggest that in earlier societies (in the Classical
Age and before) myths were not a case of man making up
"stories" to explain his world to himself, but rather the
mythical and the concrete (or material) were part of the

same moment of perception. So, earlier societies did not

Richard Earl Koch

merely explain their perceptions differently from us, but

they perceived their world differently. Barfield traces

 

a change in human consciousness, a fundamental adjustment
in the way we see our world, and he points out problems
that have resulted from our modern way of seeing. Finally,
he suggests a potential in language to help us move into a
fuller and more satisfying way of seeing our world.

Asking the question about what language can do with
the insight into that question offered by Barfield and
Cassirer provides a somewhat new slant on the central poems

by Whitman and Eliot, Song of Myself and The Waste Land.

 

 

As we examine the language of these poems we see that both
involve readers in similar ways, and on what seem to be in-
tellectual, emotional, and even physical levels. And we

see that implicitly in The Waste Land and explicitly in

 

Song of Myself the poets have the same hope for their lan-

 

guage and a similar achievement with it. The poems drama—
tize different visions, but their language creates similar
reader experiences. In the direction that the language of
both poems points is a potential for moving beyond purely
concrete reality and so for solving several fundamental
modern philosophical dilemmas.

Eliot's late masterpeice, the Four Quartets, at-

 

temps to unite vision and language accomplishment in a way

somewhat different from The Waste Land, and in some ways

 

like Song of Myself, though it explores a different ground

 

Richard Earl Koch

than either of those poems. Two of Whitman's later poems,
"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and "When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," attempt to use the vision

of Song of Myself to face man's most frightening limita-

 

tion, his mortality. In these poems the two poets suggest
that part of an understanding beyond usual twentieth-
century understanding rests in accepting all_of life: pain
and joy, potential and limitation, life and death. Through
experiencing life with our full beings, including logic and

the imagination, a fuller understanding is possible.

WALT WHITMAN, T. S. ELIOT, AND THE

DILEMMA OF MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS

BY

Richard Earl Koch

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1974

C) Copyright by
Richard Earl Koch
1974

For MY MOTHER AND FATHER,
with thanks for their

love and teaching

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the members of my dissertation
committee: Roger K. Meiners and E. Fred Carlisle, the co-
directors, and William A. Johnsen. Over several years now
my "coedirectors" have counseled and guided me. I am very
grateful to Fred Carlisle for introducing me to the ideas
and spirit of experience-centered teaching, and to Roger
Meiners for sharing with me his profound reading of modern
poetry and his response to the ideas of Owen Barfield.

Both men have taught me a great deal about literature and
the field of English, but even more about being human.

William Johnsen assisted me throughout this study,
and as it reached its crossroads he surely and continuously
helped me to bring it to a meaningful conclusion. The cen-
tral point of this study is to an important degree the re-
sult of the discussions we had.

Finally, I would like to thank Linda W. Wagner who
read large portions of this study and helped shape it.

And I would like to thank Alan M. Hollingsworth, Chairman
of the Department of English, and James H. Pickering, Chair-
man of Graduate Studies, for their help and encouragement

during my years as a graduate student.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTER I. WHITMAN AND ELIOT, VISIONS OF DIFFERENT

WORLDS . O I O O O O O O O O O O O O Q C D l 0

CHAPTER II. OWEN BARFIELD AND THE HISTORY OF MEANING,
A NEW WAY OF S EE I NG O O O I O O O O C O O 3 1

CHAPTER III. SONG OF MYSELF AND THE WASTE LAND,
LANGUAGE AS A BRIDGE . .f. . .I. . . . . 51

CHAPTER IV. THE SWAMP, THE DESERT, AND THE WORLD
BEYOND O O O O O O O O O I O O Q I I O O 8 0

iv

INTRODUCTION

What is the difference between Pablo Picasso and
Andrew Wyeth?

Let me say as I ask this question that I am an
amateur art lover, not a knowledgeable art critic. But
let us also assume that we will not settle for the quickest,
most simple-minded answer (Picasso is crazy, or Picasso is
too "far out" for "normal" people). As to why I ask the
question at all, perhaps that can be allowed to clear it-
self up as I go on.

I am using wyeth here to stand for representational
or "realistic" painting. I will not say much about him ex-
cept to explain that I do not mean to criticize his work or
to suggest that it is not valuable and enjoyable. On the
other hand, Wyeth's paintings, which characterize American
life as we know it in pictures which are somewhat like very
clear photographs, does not need defending--everyone can
sense that Wyeth sees like we see, and that his paintings
have the ability to remind us of things we have seen or of
things as we think they would be if we saw them. His paint-
ings seem to capture realistic scenes for us and save them

for the future.

Picasso, however, has painted works which are not
entirely "realistic" and many Of which are extreme in their
non-realism--we can hardly tell what they are about. For-
tunately Picasso has painted so many paintings in so many
styles that we do not need to be art critics to be able to
figure out something of what he is doing. In paintings
like "The Old Guitarist" the Old man and his guitar seem
fairly realistic. Of course the Old man's face is a gray-
blue, which is not very realistic. And this man is sitting
more awkwardly than we would imagine an old person (or a
young one for that matter) would sit most of the time. And
he seems to be sitting in an especially strange place, made
up of a series of flat surfaces, like it is all hard clay
or cement around him. But, it is not too difficult for us
to tell that these somewhat unrealistic touches are meant
to emphasize something about the Old man. By the way the
old man's head is bowed so severely, by his raggy clothes,
and by his face we can tell this is a sad picture. And,
we can see that the qualities of the painting which are non-
realistic emphasize this sadness. The old man is sagging
and somewhat emaciated; it looks like he might like to lie
down; but the area around him is hard and empty; there
really is no place to lie down. And so he remains seated
uncomfortably, with his guitar, fighting the impulse of his
body to rest. There is a sadness and harshness in life,

and perhaps especially in being Old, that Picasso is trying

to express. And he has been willing to give up some "real-
ism" in order to capture the essence of this feeling.

In a more "far out" painting, "Three Musicians,"
Picasso has made the instruments "funny looking," and the
musicians do not have faces or bodies in the usual real-
istic sense, though we can figure where some parts of their
bodies are. If wyeth had painted three musicians we would
be able to see "what they look like" and what they had on.
However, in this Picasso painting there is a flurry Of
colors and shapes which even to the amateur eye suggest
motion and activity--our eyes busily work around in the
painting carried here and there by shapes or a certain con-
tinuous flow of one color or another.

Is Wyeth really "realistic" while Picasso is not?
Surely sadness is real. And surely when we are watching
and listening to musicians there is a continuous motion

and flow in the experience. We do not experience musicians

 

like a still photograph, which, if we think about it, would
only be "real" if the musicians were frozen and not playing
any music at all. In other words so called "realistic"
painting like wyeth's, and so called non-realistic painting
like Picasso's capture different qualities of real life,
but both present very real experiences, and it depends on
how we are looking at it at the time and what part of real-
ity we are talking about whether one is more real than the

other. wyeth's paintings seem more real because they are

part of a conventional way we are E§E§.E2 having art repre-
sent life. But wyeth's paintings are not all that life is.

We would not physically torture ourselves in order
to experience pain--because it is real. But, it is a
growth in understanding life if we explore normal emotions
like sadness, trying to understand them better, and if we
explore music as motion in addition to exploring it at a
moment of pause or as people playing it in certain costumes.
It is not bad to have conventional ways we see things, con-
ventions can be helpful and pleasurable; but a convention
that becomes the 22$! way we can do things, or the only way
we can see things has become a prison for the mind and body.
I believe that man in his fullness is a subtle and profound
being, but that in order to achieve his potential he must
not build prisons around himself; rather he must use his
full imagination to probe for a full and rich understanding
of life and of others. I believe that this is part of the
meaning of a Picasso painting. And I believe this is the
reason why, whether we understand and relate to Picasso
ourselves, we should make a habit of warmly accepting ex-
periments like his and we should be willing to try to ex-
plore the explorations of others.

But this is to be a study of poetry. I introduce
it in this way because I hope that it is, at the same time,
a study Of the potential of the human imagination, and of

the potential for fullness of experience in life. I also

introduce the study in this way because I believe the dif:
ference between the world Picasso is painting and the world
wyeth is painting is a complex and important difference.
Their difference from one another may show how we can un-
derstand ourselves in different ways as we experience life.
I will not try to settle this difference in terms of
Picasso and wyeth. But I would like to suggest that the
poetry of Whitman and Eliot, which we recognize as being
very different from one another first, may be more differ-
ent than our usual sense of people having different points
of view, and second, as Picasso's painting seems to, they
may suggest something about the way we might approach life
to more fully experience it and understand it.

I began this study because of a growing respect and
liking for the poetry of Whitman and Eliot, because my con-
tinuing curiosity was provoked by the fact that they are
central, important modern poets and yet very different from
one another, and because they are both sufficiently complex
to yield further understanding of life through the full ex-
periencing of their work. And finally, I have taken the
particular slant that I have on their work because of the
insight into the modern imagination I believe the work of
Owen Barfield provides. His insight needs to be incor-
porated into our way of thinking about ourselves, I believe;
and if I can help bring his insights to provide a helpful
perspective on Whitman and Eliot I will be very pleased

with that as a contribution.

If there is a moral purpose I have other than the
ones I have already listed it would be to oppose a des-
tructive impulse in government and in education today to
try to turn education, even education in the arts, into a
mechanical process--a situation where "testing results"
is more important than teaching students and where things
are "simplified" by thinking Of students as machines which
can be "programmed" a certain way to achieve certain de-
sired results in performance. These tendencies are pres-
ently traveling under the names of "behaviorism" and
"accountability." It is important for us to look at how
people "behave"; that is part of how you evaluate what
you are doing in education. And, it is important for
teachers to want to be held responsible (accountable) for
what they do-—that too is a healthy and necessary part of
teaching. However, when "behavior" is defined in a mechan-
ical way, and when accountability if defined in terms of
computer readouts on mechanically "tested results" this
can lead to an over-simplifying and a dehumanizing of the
educational process. If you perceive yourself as a person,
then the "behavior" you will most want to teach will be
that which allows the students under your care to use their
imaginations (and the knowledge of your field) fruitfully
to meet the challenge of a rapidly changing world full Of
other human beings. If you perceive yourself more or less

as a machine then you will probably most want to teach

performance of mechanical tasks which are easy to measure
and numerically categorize. Sometimes this can be done,
but it must be done with very great care and with full at-
tention to what it means to be a human being in the world
today.

I believe that the poetry of Walt Whitman and T. S.
Eliot, the language studies of Owen Barfield and Ernst
Cassirer, the painting of Pablo Picasso, and our own sense
Of the beauty and worth of the human being will prevent us
from reducing ourselves as behaviorists suggest, and will
instead take us down another road, toward a fuller experi-
encing of life, a fuller understanding of ourselves, and a
greater appreciation for one another.

This study focuses on the poetry Of Whitman and
Eliot and on the light the language studies of Barfield
casts on their work. Because the poems of Whitman and
Eliot have been so thoroughly read and explicated I have
devoted little attention to that process except perhaps
with "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "Gerontion" in the first
chapter. And, I have also not summarized the scholarship
on these two poets because: (1) The scholarship is so
voluminous as to unnecessarily burden this study if in-
cluded, and (2) The general drift of the poems of Whitman
and Eliot is so well established by this time that a re-
hearsal of how the views were arrived at is unnecessary.

For those who might like to refresh their memories of this

"drift" of study I refer to, or who might like to inform
themselves of who I see as providing me with important
preparation for my own study Of the poems I have included
an annotated bibliography Of sources on Whitman, Eliot,
language, and modern literature in general, all of which
I feel have had some influence on the shape and direction
of my thinking at this point in my life.

However, there are several literary works I feel
I owe a special debt to. E. Fred Carlisle's The Uncertain

Self: Whitman's Drama of Identity places the poetry of

 

Whitman in the context Of the existential search for the
self (by the poet)--a context which is at once the most
sensible and most rewarding that has been supplied for
Whitman's poetry to date. I hope my study is complemen-
tary to Carlisle's. That is its goal. R. K. Meiners has

written a study of the poetry of Robert Lowell, Everything

 

to be Endured, and an essay, "On Modern Poetry, Poetic Con-

 

Sciousness, and the Madness of Poets," which brings the
spirit and knowledge of Barfield to bear on modern poetry
in ways that have taught me about both in profound ways.
Meiners is the modern critic most in tune with Barfield of
any that I have read. I also have especially benefited
from Herbert N. Schneidau's Ezra Pound: The Image and the
3331 which studies, through the prose and poetry of Ezra
Pound, the full complexity of the image and the use Of

metaphor in modern poetry; and I am especially indebted to

F. O. Matthiessen's Achievement of T. S. Eliot, which

 

reads Eliot's poetry with great care and with depth of in-
sight into the modern condition of man.

I have been so influenced by Carlisle, Meiners,
and Barfield that their work pervades my study even when
not formally cited. I rely continually on Carlisle's sense
Of Whitman's poems in my study, and the most profound ex-

ample of this may be my treatment of Song of Myself which

 

draws much of its sense of that poem as a process of the
poet discovering the full self from Carlisle's book. In
Chapter II my examples of dualistic consciousness in modern
society--the way we look at the Bible, and the way we treat
our enviornment--are from Barfield and Meiners respectively.
I cite these examples only to demonstrate how much I owe to

these three writers, and to express my gratitude.

CHAPTER I

WHITMAN AND ELIOT, VISIONS
OF DIFFERENT WORLDS
Owen Barfield begins his short book, Saving the

Appearances, by suggesting that:

There may be times when what is most needed is, not so
much a new discovery or a new idea as a different
'slant'; I mean a comparatively Slight readjustment in
our wa of looking at the things and ideas on which
attention is already fixed.1

Barfield then proceeds to challenge the very concept of
reality of modern western society. He builds his argument
about modern perception through a careful examination of
the meanings of words in the English language, and espe-
cially through an examination of the language of poetry.
Without proposing such a large task as Barfield's, I would
like to further examine the language in some of the major
poetry of Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot in the spirit of
Barfield, to see if this reveals a new and helpful slant
on their work. Whitman and Eliot are both central to the
development of modern poetry. And, to the extent we imag-
ine modern poetry as a spectrum at once philosophical and
stylistic, Whitman and Eliot become the opposite ends of

that spectrum. We sense that Whitman's art and mind is

10

ll

Opposed to Eliot's. I believe, however, that a further
study of the language Of their poetry in light Of Barfield
can show that Whitman and Eliot at their most profound

level are not opposites but unified in a special way in

 

both their purpose and achievement.

Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and Eliot's
"Gerontion" are two representative poems which will serve
to raise the questions that result from looking at Whitman
and Eliot side by side. And they can also dramatize the
apparent opposition of the two poets as they introduce
themes which pervade the major long poems: Whitman's §223

of Myself and Eliot's The Waste Land and the Four Quartets.

 

 

 

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "Gerontion" both attempt to
deal with some of man's primary limitations and to over-
come them. And, by the time the poems arrive at their con-
clusions, they seem to create visions of two very different
worlds, Whitman's where at least one primary limitation--
time-~can be overcome, and Eliot's where time and space
seem to be boundaries that are closing in on the speaker,
trapping him in a meaningless and fragmented world.

In "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" Whitman attempts to
transcend time through two basic methods: first, by creat-
ing a joint presence with his reader on the ferry, and sec-
ond, by using this joint presence, and the shared experi-
ence it implies, to help the reader envision time as some—

thing like distance, something that we can imagine crossing

12

to join each other. He begins by referring to a general-
ization which the reader of a poem implicitly accepts as
he begins reading, that the poet cares about his audience.
But he also teases us with the suggestion that he cares

for us in a way we are not fully aware of:

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years
hence are more to me, and more in my meditations,
than you might suppose.

By Opening with a generalization so broad that the reader
easily accepts it Whitman begins to nurture a habit of ac-
cepting which he will utilize later in the poem. Next he
offers a description of the experiences of crossing the
ferry that will not be changed by time, that he and his

reader may both experience:

Others will watch the run of flood-tide,

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and
west, and the heights of Brooklyn south and east,

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross,
the sun half an hour high,

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years
hence, others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide,
the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide. (2, 9-13)

He saves for last, as if to cement his point, those parts
of the experience which are most permanent, the sun and the
tide. The permanence of those elements of the scene im—
plies his point, that time is not an absolute barrier.

Even some physical aspects of experience seem to span in-

finitely across it.

13

Then, as he asserts that neither time nor distance
can separate us because of our shared experience, he also
begins to subtly link time and distance. Our usual sense

of time begins to disappear:

It avails not, time nor place--distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or
ever so many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky,
so I felt, (3, 1-3)

He substantiates this claim by presenting additional sights
that we share, lacing his description with the kind of sen-
sory detail that makes us feel as if we are viewing wttt
him. If he can create the experience £95 us with his words,
then we will feel like we are $2 the experience with him,

as if he has crossed all barriers to join us. Of these
sights the most captivating is his description of the sea-

gulls. He says he:

Watched the twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high
in the air floating with motionless wings,
Oscillating their bodies,

Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their
bodies and left the rest in strong shadow,

Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual
edging toward the south,

Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,

(3, 9-12)

It is out of the intensity of this shared experience that
the poet asserts exuberantly that nothing stands between
him and his reader, "Whatever it is, it avails not--dis-
tance avails not, and place avails not" (5, 3). As he has

been bridging time with his images he has also completed

l4

exchanging the word ttmg for the word distance, to help us
imagine time as something we can travel back and forth on.
His images and language make us feel as if he is traveling
across time to join us.

The poet moves still closer to us by speaking of
the misfortunes we share. He assures us the "dark patches"
(6, 1-2) fall upon us all. These are different from the
other shared experiences because of their psychic nature.
And finally, because of the substantial number of experi-
ences we share, and the degree to which we share them, and
because of his subtle reconceptualizing of time, Whitman

asserts his actual presence:

Closer yet I approach you,

What thought you have of me now, I had as much of
you--I laid in my stores in advance,

I consider'd long and seriously of you before you
were born.

Who was to know what should come to me?

Who knows but I am enjoying this?

Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as

looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?
(7: 1'6)

It is significant that the word ttmg is not used in this
later part of the poem, only distance. The conceptual
transformation is complete too, and the poet in this last
stage feels a sense of power and of joy in his assumption
that he and the reader are now united even across time.

He commands the elements of his crossing to remain: "Flow
on, river . . .," "Frolic on . . . waves" (9, 1-2). And

he suggests that in our relationship with him is a

15

fulfilling of our best potential: "About my body for me,
and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas" (9, 22).
So what began as a peaceful meditation on the Brooklyn
ferry has gradually grown in intensity and energy until the
speaker suggests it has transformed time and united him
with us. His contemplation of his experience has become

an attempt finally to recreate that experience for us, and
to cause us to feel his presence. In the shared moment of
the poem, and in the concrete experience Of it, the poet is
striving for the language in which poet and reader will rec-
ognize a relationship they share across time.

In "Gerontion" Eliot creates a speaker who has a
very different experience from the speaker of "Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry." This speaker, instead of confidently as-
serting his meaningful participation in experience, sees his
world as a confusing dilemma and is unable to break through
these feelings to make satisfying contact with that world
or with other people. Daniel R. Schwarz has described
"Gerontion" as the "process of unsuccessful meditation."3
The old man speaker of the poem, Schwarz says, explains his
inability to believe through reason and logic while also
groping for the faith beyond logic on which his salvation
depends. The failure of this effort explains, for Schwarz,
the seeming incoherence of the poem, and results in the
final section in which "Gerontion's meditation poignantly '

dissolves into self-deprecation" (50). The Old man Of this

16

poem, like the speaker of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," tries
to perceive a unity in his experience which will help him
have faith and so gain salvation.

In his interpretation Schwarz emphasizes two cen-
tral qualities of the poem: the old man's intense desire
to achieve faith in the meaning of his life, and the man's
despairing recognition of the total emptiness of his life
and his world. The old man begins by noting his general

lack of involvement in events or action:

I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain

Nor knee deep in the salt marsh . . .4

This statement is followed by a series of images which are
fragmented and disunified, showing a corrupt and ugly world,
a world in which people are reduced to the functions they

serve:

My house is a decayed house,

And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,

Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
(7-10)

In the main body of the poem the old man considers
and dismisses several potential sources of hope: words,
religion, and history. He begins by linking words and re-
ligion. "Signs are taken for wonders," he says. And the

expression "taken for" implies mistakenly. Then he Offers

 

one of man's continuing religious hopes, "We would see a

sign!" (1?). But in the next three lines he reduces words

17

to senselessness and dismisses them, as Christ enters omi-
nously. It is implicit, as Schwarz points out, that Christ
enters to rebuke those who call for a sign, as he does in

the Bible:

The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger (18-20)

In those lines, "Swaddled with darkness" refers to the
words but also reaches forward to describe Christ, who in
addition to coming in darkness enters as the threatening
tiger.

The next part of the poem opens with references to
several ways of being devoured, "To be eaten, to be di-
vided, to be drunk" (22). Schwarz views this section as a
perverse Lord's Supper. At the very least it is an inter-
ruption of the Old man's attempt at meditation by a brief
parade of characters who seem to be engaged in insignifi-
cant and unrelated activities. When the old man becomes
alert again he begins to consider history, which he views
as a temptress who either does not give what is tantaliz-
ingly offered, or who offers up meanings which are so in-
complete that they nurture the craving in her audience for

understanding:

And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in . . . (39-41)

18

Here the tiger reappears briefly, but he is not a protector
because it is "Us he devours" (49). The ominous appearance
of Christ is fulfilled; and the old man, nearing the end of
his meditation, mourns his loss of beauty, and the loss of
his senses. He identifies with the spider and the weevil
which move unceasingly and unheroically toward death. Like
Whitman, Eliot here raises the image of the gull; but here
it is the gull's death that the old man witnesses: "White
feathers in the snow, the gulf claims" (72). The image of
the gull entering the whitecapped waves emphasizes the Old
man's feeling of being isolated and mortal in an infinitely
large and mysterious world. He, like the gull, is alone,
unstruggling, and waiting for death.

The differences between "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"
and "Gerontion" are extreme. Both poems begin and end with
their relationship to water, but "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"
begins at "Flood-tide" and concludes with a last stanza in
which the speaker exhorts the seas to "Flow on" and "Frolic
on." "Gerontion" begins "in a dry month" with the old man
"waiting for rain." And it ends, not with a rain come to
relieve the land and the man, but rather with the drought
absorbing the man into it, so he is reduced to "Thoughts
of a dry brain in a dry season." Whitman's speaker is in
a crowd on a ferry and spanning generations through time,
while the Old man is isolated and alone, except for the boy

reading to him. Whitman's speaker attempts to invite us

19

into the poem, and even into a belief about what the poem
can do--it can bridge the gap between generations and
transcend the barrier of time. This speaker tries to en-
tice us with visual imagery and to persuade us to let him
approach us physically and spiritually.

The Old man of "Gerontion" carries on his medita-
tion seemingly unaware of our presence. His Opening line,
"Here I am, an old man" is as close as he comes to address-
ing us directly. Even his references to "you," and "us,"
and "we" seem mainly to suggest that he feels his plight is
like that of his whole generation. His remarks are neither
conversational nor enticing to the reader. They ramble
like a monologue to the self which we are simply overhear—
ing. He does not directly try to persuade us of anything.
Indirectly, he builds a case for a certain belief about the
world: that it is empty of meaning and hopeless. In
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" the speaker's meditation grows in
intensity and meaning and unites him with the reader. In
"Gerontion" the old man's attempt at meditation gradually
breaks down in its search for a thread of meaning in experi-
ence, leaving the Old man desperate and alone.

These essential contrasts are even further height-
ened by looking more particularly within the two poems.

The spectrum idea about Whitman and Eliot, the sense that
they are in Opposition, seems to be more and more confirmed.

The different treatments of the sea-gull imagery in the two

20

poems establish the difference in their stance toward their
world even more fully. Whitman's speaker presents the pre-
cise sensory experiencing of the flight in his description
of their "motionless wings" and Of their "oscillating" bod-
ies and of how the "glistening yellow" lights up parts of
their bodies. In "Gerontion" there is a brief image Of
struggling flight in the "gull against the wind," and there
is the image suggesting the gull's death, "white feathers
in the snow," but it is the tggt Of the gull's death which
is important. The images are not pursued or developed for
their potential precision and vitality, rather they are
presented in just enough detail to make the gull's death a
concrete experience for the Old man and for us. It is not
the gull's struggle which the Old man is concerned with but
its results.

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is filled with sights the
speaker wishes to share, and he shares them so vitally that
we experience them too. Seeing becomes a rich and vital
act for him and for us. Whitman brings the act of seeing
alive partly through his use of precise and expressive mod-
ifiers for the action and for the things that are seen. In
addition to the "oscillating" Of the sea-gulls he sees the
"thickstemm'd pipes" of steamboats, "the vapor as it flew
in fleeces tinged with violet," and the "scallop-edged
waves in the twilight." Even in the nouns and adjectives

there is often a verb-like motion and energy to the scene,

21

as in the "quick tremulous gtttt of the wheels" of a
steamer and in the "swinging motion of the hulls" of ships.
The speaker's exuberance for what he is seeing becomes al-
most a chant in the third section of the poem where the
lines successively begin: EEK! gay, gay, and one line

later they begin Look'd, Look'd, Look'd, Look'd, and then

 

 

Saw, Saw again.
In total contrast to this wealth Of seeing, and to

this enthusiasm about seeing, Eliot's speaker declares:

I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact? (60-61)

A certain loss of the senses is natural in old age, but I
do not think we are dealing with an utter loss of the abil-
ity to sense here, but rather we are dealing with the old
man's attitude toward the experience of sensing or perceiv-
ing. Exploring the sensory world with his reason and logic
will not yield up to him any feeling of spiritual under-
standing. And so he feels he must conclude that his senses
cannot bring him and others closer together, exactly the
opposite conclusion of the speaker of "Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry."

The gay things are seen is a fundamental quality
Of the Old man's experience, and the way he struggles with
language to present the experiences to his readers is a

fundamental quality of the poem technically. In the early

22

description Of the landlord, fragmentation is a central

quality Of the scene:

My house is a decayed house,

And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,

Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
(7-10)

We see that the last two lines describe the landlord and
that the grammar is correct. However, the modifiers are
so harsh and so individually set off by their alliteration
and also so lengthily drawn out that they take on a life
of their own. The descriptions raise partial images which
do not necessarily remind us of the landlord and which seem
unrelated to one another. Even though the grammar is cor-
rect the syntactical arrangement in which descriptions are
stacked on top of one another works against continuity and
coherence. It seems difficult for the Old man to sort
through this scene or to see it as a whole, and his lan-
guage creates for us a sense of the fragmentation it has
for him.

In the passage linking words and religion the frag-
mentation moves toward outright incoherence, as three sep-
arate subjects seem to be raised in three consecutive sen-
tences. The most radical shift in subject comes with the
entrance of Christ, whose entry as the tiger further com-
plicates our effort to figure out what is happening since

it does not describe our traditional sense of Christ:

23

Signs are taken for wonders. 'We would see a sign!‘
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger (17-20)

Our sense that language and religion are in "darkness" is
built upon by the mystery Of the imagery and the confusion
of the lines.

In the section of the poem on history both the na-
ture Of history and the nature Of sensory experience are
presented. History provides just enough clues that we be-
come hungrier for meaning, but that hunger is not satisfied.
And sensory experience too lures us to hope but then frus-
trates us by failing to provide meaningful experience. SO,
history, the temptress, "deceives us with whispering ambi-
tions" arousing us, but delivering too late when there is
only "reconsidered passion." The presentation of history
in these images heightens our sense of the old man's expe-
rience as one Of sensory starvation. The sense of touch
denied here is exactly what Whitman fulfills in “Crossing

Brooklyn Ferry" in order to approach us. He says he has:

Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the
negligent leaning of their flesh against me as
I sat, (6, 16)

The sense of touching flesh heightens our experience of
the power of the vital imagery to draw speaker and reader
closer together. In "Gerontion" the speaker has made it

clear he sees no such potential.

24

In contrast to "Gerontion" and the way its syntax
and progression of images helps build a fragmented world,
Whitman's lines are often conversational, "It is not upon
you alone the dark patches fall," and "What I promis'd
without mentioning it, have you not accepted?" His images
are part of the scene around the ferry, usually related to
the ships and the water. And sometimes he pauses over an
image, as he does with the sea-gulls, letting it grow into
an even fuller experience of seeing. We feel Whitman's
speaker talking warmly to us. But we feel the Old man of
"Gerontion" desperately trying to make sense to himself.

Perhaps at the heart of what seem to be the differ-
ent worlds of the two poems is the difference in the degree
of action in each. In "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" the imagery
is in motion and alive. And the speaker himself declares
that he is moving toward us. The nouns and adjectives of—
ten seem in action, as I have suggested with references to
words like ytttl and swinging. Whitman develops this sense
of motion further through his verbs. In section two he
uses a sequence of verbs to make seeing and acting seem
one: "Others will enter the gate," "Others will watch,"
and "Others will see" he says, joining the ideas of enter-
ing and seeing, and communicating that there are different
ways of seeing (watching and seeing are different).

This poem throughout does not rely on the active

verb as much as some of Whitman's exuberant poems. But its

25

last section Opens with an explosion of powerful verbs as
the speaker commands the scene around him to remain for
those who will follow him. Nearly every line in this stage

begins with a verb: Flow 22' Frolic 22' Gaze, Play, Fly

 

 

22' Diverge, Flaunt, Burn, Thrive, and Expand. This part

 

 

Opens with the idea of flowing 22 which is the central one
in the poem, and in a way the main goal of the poet. And
it ends with expand, another way of putting the same hope.
All of these verbs are richly suggestive. Frolicking is a
special way of moving which carries with it a whole mood
and frame of mind. To gaze is to look in a special relaxed
and yet intense way. These words create an atmosphere that
they try to draw the reader into. And they suggest, in
themselves and in their variety, that the scene itself is
alive with both motion and feelings. The passage seeks to
involve us in not only the meanings of these words but in
the feelings they suggest and in their growing energy as
each line opens with action building a chant—like flow of
action that can be felt in the act of speaking the passage.
With "Gerontion" again it is different. The uni-
fied images are absent. The scene is not alive except with
the moods of frustration and despair amidst the fragmenta-
tion of images and ideas. Flashes of vitality, as in the
"gull against the wind," are not developed. G. R. Hamilton

points out in The Tell-Tale Article that there is often a

 

shortage of verbs in Eliot's poetry, a point which seems

26

basically true, and "Ash Wednesday" is one prominent exam-
ple. But, in "Gerontion" there is no shortage of verbs.

It is the way the verbs Operate that is so radically dif-
ferent from Whitman's poem. The majority of the verbs are
passive, negative, or forms of "to be." Other verbs creep
in as harsh modifiers creating some action, but it is ac-
tion which emphasizes decay and fragmentation. This means
that in the world of "Gerontion" we experience respectively:
how things are acted upon, how they §g_tgt act, or how—-
when they act--their action is imprecise and de-energized
as in the verb "to be." The old man introduces himself as
a man who has not engaged in meaningful action, "I was
neither at the hot gates," "Nor fought," "Nor knee deep" he
says. We learn that he is passive because he sees no hope
of meaningful action. He believes also that he cannot see,
"I have lost my sight," and there is nothing to see but a
"wilderness of mirrors."

The most disturbing way things are acted upon in
the poem is their being "eaten" or "devoured." At one
point we are all devoured by the tiger, and because we are
encouraged to think of the tiger as Christ, the devouring
becomes particularly disturbing. We are not only devoured,
but since there is no active stage in the poem, we are de-
voured without struggle. This feeling of being consumed
may be seen as the passive version of Whitman's idea of

being unified with. This passive stance of the poem is

27

dramatized by the fact that the speaker himself engages in
only one action in the entire seventy-six lines. That act
comes as he declares "I/ Stiffen in a rented house" (50-51).
Stiffening in a house, something which occurs perhaps be-
cause Of inactivity, is the Opposite of going out to meet
the world.

The poems seem to dramatize different worlds:
Eliot's where everything is "fractured atoms," and Whitman's
where parts can be "disintegrated yet part of the scheme."
One consists of extreme fragmentation, and the other strives
for a complete wholeness and unity. The contradiction be-
tween them seems absolute. For Whitman's speaker there is
a great potential to act on the world and to create rela-
tionships, like the one he proposes to have with his read—
ers. And for this speaker even sensory perception is 22:
tigp. Perception is the act of meeting the world. What he

sees he also experiences unconfined by time, distance, or

 

any other barriers.

For the Old man of "Gerontion" of course these pos-
sibilities do not exist. For him there is no possibility
for meaningful action or for sensory perception of any con-
sequence. And this is the loss of his senses which he
mourns--the loss of the power Of the senses to find meaning.
He has also lost faith in the power of language to communi-
cate. He feels language can neither sort his world out

clearly for him nor make meaningful contact with others.

28

He understands his situation very well. And as his appar-
ently struggling language gives us glimpses of the world
he sees, we come to understand it too. We see that he
feels entirely contained in time, entirely cut Off from
history and from salvation, and that he is desperately
aware of his own concreteness, his own mortality.

One of these visions is infinitely preferable to
the other. But the question is not so simple as which do
we want. It quickly occurs to us to ask, which is right?
Or, put another way, how can they both be right? We could
talk of optimism and pessimism, but the poems will not be
reduced to this. The source of their differences cannot
be dealt with merely by suggesting that different people
have different temperaments, nor can it be dealt with in a
facile comment about keeping a cheery outlook. Each poem
does indeed seem to Offer an outlook different from the
other. But what is meant by outlook here is a more elusive
and complex thing than the moods we go through from day to
day.

Establishing for ourselves a few standard ways the
question cannot be answered leads us back around again to
the question: which poem is right about what reality is?
We can break that question down somewhat, or at least deal
with parts of it, by asking two other questions. What kind
of perception is possible (that is, what kind of sensory

perception and what kind of understanding)? And, what

29

kinds of relationships are possible with our world and
with other people? One way to pursue these questions
would be to turn exclusively to rigorous philosophical in-
quiry, though it would be difficult to know exactly how or
where to turn because the questions are so fundamental and
so broad. Another direction we might turn is suggested by
the fact that the questions are raised in poetry, and the
heart of poetry is language. A central question which will
put the consideration of reality properly into the realm of
poetry is: Can language accomplish what the speaker of
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry? claims that it can accomplish?
95! is language limited in the ways the old man of
"Gerontion" suggests that it is? Can language transcend
the boundaries of space and time? Or, is language, like
our bodies, limited to a certain place and a certain moment?
All of these queStions so far have assumed a unity
of purpose between the speaker Of the poems and the poet,
and this is a very dangerous assumption, as often wrong as
it is right. With Whitman's speaker the identity with the
poet seems complete. At least the accomplishment the poet
seeks through language seems to also have been the goal
dramatized by the speaker $2 the poem. With "Gerontion"
this consideration unlocks new possibilities. For one
thing the speaker claims that language cannot achieve mean-
ingful contact with other people, and he seems right about

how language works for him, but for us the poem does seem

30

to communicate meaningfully. We achieve a satisfying de-
gree of understanding and we even have feelings for the
quality of the old man's experience, a relationship which
seems to contradict the old man's statements about lan-
guage. But, this does not mean that the poems are the
same--clearly they are different to an important degree,
as this chapter has been establishing.

The exact nature of the differences and similari—
ties between the two poems is a question which requires
further answering. We should pursue these questions fur-
ther into the poetry of Whitman and Eliot, which I propose
to do. But it can also help if we explore the questions
about language more generally. By looking at the history
of language we can try to see what language has seemed to
accomplish in the past and what it seems to be accomplish-
ing in speech today. Owen Barfield is concerned with the
history Of the meanings of words in poetry and in daily
speech, with what words do in relation to the world and in
relation to the people who speak them. For this reason,
and because of the fundamental nature Of his arguments, I

believe Barfield is our best guide in this exploration.

Chapter II

OWEN BARFIELD AND THE HISTORY OF
MEANING, A NEW WAY OF SEEING

Owen Barfield has been engaged in a study of the his-
tory of language and the potential of words for many years and

through several books, including Saving the Appearances, His-

 

tory in English Words, Poetic Diction, and other works. On

 

 

several fundamental issues raised by the study of language
Barfield is clearly allied with Ernst Cassirer, though the two
argue their cases without reference to one another; and Susanne
Langer is convinced that they arrived at their similar conclu-
sions totally independent of one another.5 Both Barfield and

Cassirer focus their studies on two key words: myth and meta-

 

EBB£° These words are associated with the figurative potential
Of language, and they are central words because it is generally
agreed that language tends to become more and more figurative

as we trace it back into history. By figurative I mean that
quality of language which allows it to suggest non-logical re-
lationships between events, or between events and their explana-
tions (the Greek and Roman gods of the Classical Age and the
way these gods were intimately related to concrete material ex-
periences in the lives of people is one example of this quality
of language in action). However, there is substantial disagree-
ment about‘why language grows more figurative as we look farther

back; and there is also disagreement about what this means.

31

32

Barfield and Cassirer, however, are in agreement in
their explanations. And both choose to put their views in
contrast to those of Max Muller, a nineteenth-century student
of language. Muller suggests that there was an undetermined
point when, in an Age of Metaphor, man created the figurative
quality in a language which had previously not known such a
quality. Muller feels that metaphor was then used to help man
explain his world to himself. Basically Muller is saying that
early man observed nature and then made up stories to explain
it to himself. Within his theory metaphor is merely an inter-
esting way of comparing one thing with another. And metaphor
coupled to pytp (the myths of the gods, for example) was
simply a tool men used to create a world which was false, but
which helped "superstitious" minds feel comfortable in nature
because of the way it "explained" nature in fable form (SA,
42).

In disagreeing with this interpretation Barfield re--
peatedly argues in his studies that there is a fundamental dif—
ference between modern man and the man of early societies in
their perceptions Of their world. He maintains that the dif-
ferences in the two worlds are not a case of two ages making
different interpretations out of the same perception. This
means that mythology is not a case of early society "peopling"
its world with spirits or creating myths to explain phenomena.
Rather early societies perceived myth pg BEEP gt the phenomena.
For them the mythical and the concrete were one thing, viewed

as such in the same moment Of perception. They both (we would

33

say pptp) simply were. For modern man, since the scientific
revolution, perception is of concrete or material phenomena
which he explains through rational scientific laws or which he
feels he will explain once he has had sufficient time to study
the phenomena. For us today pytp is fiction, and we often
consider the basic distinction to be between myth and reality,
as if they are opposites (g5, 75).

Barfield begins to help us change this idea as he re-
minds us, especially in Saving the Appearances, of the nature
Of our own perceptions. He begins with a discussion of seeing
a rainbow, and he argues that we understand that the rainbow
is not really out there in any way that is verifiable except
to our eyes. We know that if we walk toward it the rainbow
will disappear, and that we could not touch it even if it
could be approached. We know that it is a phenomenon caused
by refraction of sunlight as it passes through particles Of
water in clouds. In short, we know that the rainbow is the
product of this light, water, and our eyes; and we know that
as a rainbow it does not exist except t2 our eyes. We may at
first be inclined to think Of an Object like a tree as perhaps
more "real" than a rainbow. We not only see a tree, but we
can approach it and touch it. However, in the light of modern
physics we understand that the tree also is actually particles
(or waves?) which we call atoms. And, if we think about it,
we understand that the tree as a tree is the product of those
particles and our senses. We understand that both the rainbow

and the tree, as we sense them, are "representations" of what

V

34

is actually out there. We differentiate these representations
from hallucinations by seeking verification from other people
that they see or somehow sense them also, thereby establishing
them as collective rgpresentations. But, even when the repre-
sentations are confirmed as shared with others, we understand
that these representations are not the same as reality (St,
15-18). And this knowledge--that what we see does not equal
all of reality--suggests that people might have seen differ-
ently in the past and that we might see differently in the
future.

In relation to "Gerontion" and "Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry" Barfield's argument raises the consideration that what
seem to be merely different interpretations of reality may be
more profoundly different experiences or perceptions. His ar-
gument substantiates that there is such a thing as different
consciousnesses which amout to different realities because
they are not interpretations but entirely different visions.
I am pgt suggesting that Whitman and Eliot wrote out of differ—
ent consciousnesses--nothing like this could be suggested with-
out further exploring Eliot's and even Whitman's relationship
to their speakers. However, that their poetry might deal with
modern consciousness in some way (that is, that it might deal
with our fundamental way of seeing the world) is a possibility
Barfield's study introduces.

Barfield further suggests the complexity Of perception
by demonstrating that what seems like a simple sensory percep-

tion is Often the result of both our senses and a mental

35

process. His example is our belief that we hear a thrush.
Barfield argues that what we actually hear is a sound. "Hear-
ing a thrush" is the result of our at one time undergoing the
mental process in which a sound we were hearing was associated
with a thrush. It is not important how we learned that the
sound was the song of a thrush; it is only important that we
see that at one point a mental process was required for us to
make the connection. Now when we "hear a thrush" it seems
like a perception because our recognition is immediate and
happens instantly with our hearing of the sound. The process
occurs in a single unbroken movement (SA, 20). Another way of
approaching the subject of this close relationship between per—
ception and mental process is to notice that sometimes our men—
tal processes seize upon insufficient sensory data, or misuse
adequate sensory data, to conclude that a stranger walking
toward us is a familiar acquaintance. When the person gets
closer, it may take us longer than we would have supposed nec-
essary to recognize that he is actually a stranger because
once we had it in our mind that he was familiar our senses
seemed to focus on his familiar characteristics while being
inclined to overlook that evidence which could help us correct
our error. Perhaps part of what was at work here was a desire
to see our friend. All Of this suggests the way perception and
mental processes tend to flow together and also how impermanent
and fragile our perceptions may be.

To suggest differences in past perceptions from our

own, Barfield draws on examples from medieval times. In

36

medieval art there are two qualities which especially suggest
a difference in perception. The first is the absence of per-
spective in the paintings. To Barfield this suggests that me-
dival man saw the world in a fundamentally different way:
True, it [perspective] is no more than a device for pic-
torially representing depth, and separateness in space.
But how comes it that the device had never been discovered
before-~or, if discovered, never adopted? There were
plenty of skilled artists, and they would certainly have
hit upon it soon enough if depth in space had character-
ized the collective representations they wish (sic) to re-
produce, as it characterizes ours. They did not need it.
Before the scientific revolution the world was more like a
garment men wore about them than a stage on which they
moved. (g5, 94)
The second quality now strikes us as quaint. This is the me-
dieval artist's regular practice of using the same human fig-
ures and dress to portray the spiritual as well as the physi-
cal world. Angels looked like people and "a farm cart would
do for Elijah's fiery chariot on its way up to heaven." It
was not until the art.of the eighteenth and nineteenth centue
ries that men felt obliged to supply angels with special cos-
tumes "often rather like a nightgown" (SA, 73).

The difference in perception between medieval and mod—
ern society as it is expressed in science is not as easy to
suggest in a short space, but one example of the difference is
the medieval sense of the polarity of actus and potentia which,
Barfield notes,

. . . had carried perhaps half the weight of philosophical
thought of the Western mind through all the centuries that
elapsed between Aristotle and Aquinas.

In this framework it was thought that a phenomenon was $3

potentia until experienced when it became actual. The

 

37

phenomenon had its being prior to being experienced in this

way, but it gains a particular way pt being seen when experi-

 

enced. In this framework an unseen rainbow would be classi-
fied as $2 potentia. Yet for Sir Francis Bacon this polarity
had become a "frigid distinction" because he felt nature acted
according to laws which were meaningless except gppp experi-
enced (g5, 88-94). Since the scientific revolution it has be—
come common to suggest, for example, that there is no such
thing as an unseen rainbow. The exact change in scientific
thinking is not so important, however, as our noticing that
this is a case in which truly great minds thought one way up
until a certain time (near the scientific revolution) when
their way of thinking became meaningless for those who fol-
lowed. It is not that some new discovery BEilE pp the Old way
of thinking. Rather this is a situation in which a "felt re—
ality" vanished almost without a trace. The reality vanished
so completely that it simply became meaningless to those who
followed. Whether such a perceptual realm has become "unreal"
or whether it was ever "real" is not a fruitful direction of
thought for our purposes. Rather it is simply important that
the distinction in painting and in science is not between a
"quaint” belief or method of "superstitious" people and a so-
phisticated modern perception. Instead it seems to be a case
in which equally great minds Operated out of different realms
of consciousness. And it seems that man perceived his world
in a fundamentally different way before the scientific revolu-

tion.

38

Barfield makes his strongest case, however, in his
studies of language. It is in language that he shows a dif-
ference between past and present perception most clearly. And
it is also in language that he brings us back toward Whitman
and Eliot. If Barfield shows how language reveals the nature
of modern consciousness we can then explore the language of
Whitman and Eliot in their poetry to see how they relate to
that consciousness. And if Barfield can establish that lan- -
guage has a certain potential to transcend individual realms
of consciousness we can explore the poetry of Whitman and
Eliot to see if its language uses that potential.

In Poetic Diction and Historyin English Words Barfield

 

traces language development through a focus on individual words.

The word inspiration, for example, reflects man's changing re-

 

lationship to his world. At first the word suggested to its
users that the poet was inspired or "breathed into" by a god
or an angel. Of course the poet had no control over this but
rather was possessed by it. Later inspiration meant a sort of
"divine wind" which would unpredictably blow through the poet.
Today we usually think of inspiration as "a mood that may come
and go in the course of a morning's work."6 The inspiring has
not only moved from the outside to the inside, but it has grad-
ually weakened in significance.

In all aspects of language in classical times and be-
fore, the spiritual and physical were bound together in ways
which were perfectly natural to medieval man, but which are

completely lost to us today. When a man was good humoured or

H

39

bad humoured or good tempered or bad tempered it was con-
sidered a result Of one of the four humours (blood, phlegm,

bile, and black bile) predominating in his temperament. The

 

stars and planets were considered living bodies and the char-

acter and fate of men were determined by the influences which

 

came from them. According to which planet was predominant or

 

in the aspendant in the general disposition of stars at a man's

 

birth he would be jovial (Jupiter), saturnine (Saturn), or

mercurial (Mercury). And persons or things which influenced

7

each other in this way were in sympathy or sympathetic. All

 

of these words describe qualities which were at the same time
physical and spiritual.

It is after the Reformation that the group of words
hyphened with self appears. These include: self-conceit,

selffliking, selfjlove, and self-confidence. And words which

 

 

designated an introspective attitude also began to appear.

These were words like aversion, dissatisfaction, and discom-

 

posure. Both of these developments suggest an internalizing
of consciousness. Prior to this, for medieval man, §§g_re-
tained its original sense Of "sated" or "heavy." EEEE meant
a "sudden and unexpected event." And, depression referred to
the state of the man's internal organs in addition to the way
he felt. It is particularly revealing that the verb £2,225:
sonify is an eighteenth-century verb, having no earlier coun-
terparts. Medieval man would not have needed this concept if

he was not "personifying" his world with myths (HEW, 170—181).

40

Barfield uses this evidence to challenge Muller's
conclusions about the development of language. He points
out that assuming the existence of an Age of Metaphor is
illogical since our witnessing that language gets more and
more figurative as it goes farther back should suggest
that language had figurative beginnings. If we associate
figurative language only with the general modern idea of

metaphor ii comparisop we are caught in the awkward illog-

 

ical bind that Muller is caught in. But, if with Barfield
we see that in perception and language the figurative and
the literal were one experience, the history of language
makes sense as it unfolds. Barfield clarifies his case
against Muller by taking issue with him on one important

word:

According to Max Muller, it will be remembered,
'spiritus' . . . acquired its apparently double mean-
ing, because at a certain early age, when it still
meant simply breath or wind, it was deliberately em-
ployed as a meta For to express 'the principle of life
within man or an1mal.’ All that can he replied to
this is, that such an hypothesis is contrary to every
indication presented by the study Of the history of
meaning; which assures us definitely that such a purely
material content as 'wind,‘ on the one hand, and on the
other, such a purely abstract content as 'the principle
of life within man or animal' are both late arrivals
in the human consciousness (g2, 80-81).

 

Cassirer attempts also to trace words and their

meanings back to their roots, and he discovers that:

In the creation accounts of almost all great cultural
religions, the Word appears in league with the highest
Lord of creation; either as the tool which he employs

41

or actually as the primary source from which he, like
all other Being and order of Being, is derived.8

And he notes that the name Often held the power Of the god
in these past societies; often a name was "equal to calling
a person into being" (53-55). Cassirer, like Barfield,
uses this evidence to suggest that for some earlier socie-
ties "primary 'experience' itself is steeped in the imagery
of myth and saturated in its atmosphere" (10). He also

similarly Opposes Muller as he argues:

But when we reduce it [Muller's View] to its philosoph-
ical lowest terms, this attitude turns out to be simply
the logical results of that naive realism which regards
the reality Of objects as something directly and un—

equivocally given, literally something tangible . . . .

Cassirer concludes that metaphor to the mythmaking mind is
not "mere analogy, but . . . real identification" (92).
Finally, for Cassirer the nature of myth in the past sug-

gests a continuing profound relationship between conception

 

and expression. Susanne Langer summarizes this central

 

point in her preface to Cassirer's Language and Myth:

 

Human intelligence begins with conception, the
prime mental activity; the process of conception
always culminates in symbolic expression. A concep-
tion is fixed and held only when it has been embodied
in a symbol. SO the study of symbolic forms offers a
key to the forms of human conception. The genesis of
symbolic forms——verba1, religious, artistic, mathemat-
ical, or whatever modes of expression there be--is the
Odyssey of the mind.

The two oldest of these modes seem to be language
and myth. (ix)

42

To the extent that language is the way in which
concepts become fixed, language then is also the way we
think. The profound link between language and conception
which Barfield and Cassirer describe further suggests that
language is a central instrument and a central sign of con—
sciousness--it is a primary instrument through which a cer-
tain consciousness is developed and also a central part of
that consciousness which we may study to find the nature
of that way of seeing, in order to distinguish it from
other states Of consciousness. And, finally, their studies
suggest that the relationship between language and thought
in poetry may be more than complementary, and that the lan-
guage of poetry may reveal more than the author's style;
it may reveal the nature of the reality he is living in.
And it is also possible that poetry could not only reveal
a reality but constitute a probe for a new and different
reality, or consciousness.

However, implicit in the idea that language ttggg
conception is an understanding that language somehow limits
conception as it does this. In order to create a focus
language must select; and, in selecting, only part of the
full reality is captured. Barfield describes what he feels
are "two opposing principles, or forces" of selection in
language and consciousness. There is the force which tends
to split up meanings "into a number of separate and Often

isolated concepts." Barfield calls this the non-poetic or

43

prosaic principle. The other force is the "principle of
living unity" and "it observes the resemblances between
things, whereas the first principle marks the differences."
The force which observes resemblances Barfield calls the
poetic principle (£2, 87-88). Kenneth Burke, in Language
as Symbolic Action, also pursues the idea that language
can notice similarity Or difference, which he refers to as

continuity and discontinuity. Burke calls a language

 

framework (whether literary or scientific) a "terministic
screen" through which we View experience. He argues that
". . . any nomenclature necessarily directs the attention

9 And he points

into some channels rather than others."
out that when we observe things ". . . many of the 'Obser-
vations' are but implications of the particular terminology
in terms of which the observations are made" (46). Differ-
ent language frameworks allow different perceptions, and
they help us to notice different things about reality.
Realizing that language to some extent causes different
views or slants on experience ought to make us a little
wary about declaring that what we see equals reality. For
example, our sense that myth is shallow "explanation" is
certainly partly due to the state of our language which
today itself does not allow for the possibility of unity
between the physical and the spiritual. In this very in-

fluence which language exerts over us, though, Burke shows

how language becomes a source of creative power, a power

44

through which we at least partially create what we see.
Burke believes that this power influences our natural and

our spiritual perceptions:

And insofar as man, the word-using animal ap-
proached nonverbal nature in terms Of his human ver-
balizing nature, is there not a sense in which nature
must be as much of a linguistically inspirited thing
for him as super-nature. (378)

 

To the extent that man creates (with words) the nature that
he thinks of himself as observing then, Burke concludes,
"things would be the signs of words" (379). Burke's per-
spective here emphasizes how fully words can influence us
in the development of our reality, but at other points he
would clarify this to suggest that words do not totally
create reality, even though they may intensely influence
our concept Of reality.

At one time language seemed to have the power to
create the presence of the gods. In our time language has
helped to create a perspective in which only the material
seems real, in which we tend to think of ourselves as ob-

serving, and only observing, what is out there. In the

 

twentieth century we have tended to draw a clear division
between what is me and what is not-me. My-self is $2 my
body, and this includes my spirit if I allow for that at

all. And all that is not-myself is out there and cannot

 

get in. A prime example Of this perspective in action is

the way we have treated our environment. Since it was seen

45

as out there we felt that so long as we were not directly

 

harming ourselves as we destroyed our environment then we
were ppgy harming nature. We are only beginning to sense
that there is a guality of life which we were harming all
along and that finally we are unified with our environment
in profound ways. Another example of this perspective is
the modern debate over the Bible. In a material way of
seeing either the Bible is historical truth (that is, ma-
terially true) or it is merely fiction. Either it is fact
or "just stories." Barfield is uncovering a way of viewing
the history of meaning that allows for another ground of
understanding, one which allows that a perspective may be
profoundly important without being empirically true.

This observer-Observed relationship in which modern
society has seen itself in terms of its world has led to
many benefits, one of which is the tremendous technological
progress of modern science. But as modern man came to View
this as the pply way of seeing, as if it were all of EEEl:
ity, there has been a heavy price to pay. Our sense of
ourselves as divided from our world has come to be called
dualism; and the price twentieth—century man has paid for
his acceptance of dualism as reality is that he has con-
tinually found himself desiring a life of spiritual signif-
icance but at the same time found himself able to affirm
only the material as real. We have wished for more than a

material relationship with nature and with each other and

46

also for life after our bodily deaths; but our inability

to affirm either such a relationship or such a non-bodily
existence as real has Often led to an almost desperate
frustration and sadness. This is the despair and the sad-
ness that the Old man of "Gerontion" is experiencing and
describing, and this is the kind of mortality and limited
relationships that the speaker Of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"
is trying to overcome. The central questions of the two
poems are also the fundamental questions of the twentieth
century.

Just as there is no language framework which allows
us to see entirely without operating in a certain context,
or which allows us to observe without being influenced by
language; there is also the possibility that we might use
different language frameworks to help us focus on different
aspects of reality. Barfield also argues that man is not
all that there is; that man, through his language, does not
absolutely create what is out there (just as he does not
merely Observe it). Perhaps there are situations or times
when language establishes a near absolute hold over what
man sees. And perhaps the grip of dualistic perception in
the twentieth century has been such a case. But it is
Barfield's hOpe that we may move beyond this dualism through
the renewed recognition that we participate in the act of
perceiving, and through a systematic application of the

imagination in the search for a broader reality.

47

A search for the way out of dualism is, I believe,
what Barfield, Whitman and Eliot, and thinkers in many
other fields today are engaged in. Modern physics, for ex-
ample, has been steadily breaking down the formerly neat
distinction between the observer and the observed. This
is a search in which there are not yet many definite an—
swers. However, Barfield is convinced that there is much
need in this search for the concept of polarity. Barfield
derives his sense of this concept from Samuel Taylor

10 For Coleridge,

Coleridge, a thinker he greatly admires.
a relationship in which two things are in polarity to one
another means that: we can distinguish between them, but
they cannot be divided; or, that the two parts are unified
without having become the pgpg, the two parts form a whole
but may still be distinguished from one another. This is

a concept which it is very difficult to express in language
as it has developed up to today. I

One example of our difficulty in clarifying such

relationships is the form-content discussions in literary

 

study. We know that the form of a piece Of literature and
its content or subject matter are somehow very closely re-
lated, but we have the feeling that they are not exactly
the same. Some teachers of literature are fond of declar-
ing that form and content BEE the same, that there is no
way to tell them apart. This approach makes the question

simple. And we do have a sense that form sometimes ii

48

content (that is, that form causes the content to pg a cer-
tain way). And yet, if we think about it, we realize that
there are things we would say about form and content indi-
vidually that we would not say about them jointly--in fact,
critics regularly find it helpful to separate subject and
structure in their discussions. Clearly form and content
are pet the same. They are somehow absolutely related in
a way that is essential to their individual and joint char-
acter, but they are not the same. The notion that things
are either the same thing or they are divided and separate
is a consequence of dualistic perception and a dualistic
language framework. But we are recongizing more and more
that this is merely one way of seeing and one way of talk-
ing. It seems men have seen and talked in and out of dif-
ferent realities in the past and also that it is at least
possible that men may participate in a different reality
in the future.

Barfield's studies seem to reveal a potential in
language to function beyond a purely dualistic framework.
His study of the history of meaning to some extent legiti-
mizes his claim that words "are flashing iridescent shapes
like flames--ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly-
evolving consciousness beneath them" (g2, 75). This im-
plies a powerful imaginative force potential in language.
Cassirer believes that language has limits to what it can

accomplish, but he also insists that the subtle extremes

49

to which language might take us have not been reached.

And he and Barfield are convincing in their suggestion

that language has considerable power that we have gotten
out of the habit of recognizing. As they suggest, language
does seem to have the power to help us in a systematic ap-
plication of the imagination to approach the problem of
broadening consciousness.

I believe that one important and appropriate con-
text for the poetry of Whitman and Eliot is to view it as
an attempt to cope with and explore the reality described
by modern consciousness and also to see it as a probe for
a way beyond this consciousness. In "Gerontion" and in :22

Waste Land I think Eliot explores dualistic perception to

 

its ultimate end, using language in experimental ways to
search to the far edge of that way of seeing. I believe
Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and Song of Myself are
imaginative attempts to use language to leap beyond dual-
istic consciousness without denying its existence, or in
other words, without denying the material world.

Finally, I think that the later careers of the two
poets seem to converge on a point in which the writer real-
izes the great extent of his participation in a dualistic
world and attempts to face this fact of his existence; but
rather than seeing himself as mired in this reality or as
needing to leap beyond it, the poet accepts the task of

probing language and perception for new ways of seeing and

50

new ways of expressing this seeing. This occurs in poems

like Eliot's Four Quartets and with Whitman in works like

 

"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and "When Lilacs Last
in the Dooryard Bloom'd." From all sides and in all fields
the questions are being asked that let us know we are on
the threshold of a significant change in consciousness.
Whitman and Eliot, as two Of the primary spokesmen in mod-
ern literature, may be able to help us see what that new
state of consciousness will be. It is with this hope that

I explore the language and implications of their poetry.

CHAPTER III

SONG OF MYSELF AND THE WASTE LAND,
LANGUAGE AS A BRIDGE

Barfield and Cassirer offer a general perspective
on language which can assist us in answering the questions
raised in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "Gerontion." The
general point of these language studies substantiates what
both poems imply, that language reveals the nature of the
reality the speaker is living in. Beyond this Barfield
and Cassirer seem to support the implication of "Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry" that language has an imaginative potential
to describe relationships that are not purely material or
rational. Barfield also expresses the hope that language
might be used to help create these imaginative relation-
ships, and in this way it might help modern society move
into a way of understanding which is beyond dualism. But
how far language itself may carry us is not Barfield's im-
mediate concern. He is more interested in describing a

potential in language which seems not to be commonly rec-

 

ognized today. So, the question of whether language can
transcend space and time, as "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" sug-
gests, remains to be further explored. And, the question

of how language functions in both Whitman and Eliot can now

51

52

be asked in terms of Barfield, in terms of how their lan-
guage relates to the modern dualistic perspective. Whether
either or both poets use language in such a way that it can
help point to a consciousness beyond dualism, and whether
they really belong at opposite ends of a spectrum of modern
poetry can also be further explored.

These questions seem to range over several differ-
ent areas of study, but in our exploring the syntax and
diction of Whitman's and Eliot's poetry we can approach
them all at once. In studying their language we at first
see more fully the nature of the differences in their poems,
and we see more clearly their apparent opposition. But in
the end, through their language we can discover how, at a
more profound level, their poems are unified in their pur-
pose and achievement; both use language in such a way that
it points toward a new consciousness. In this discovery
about the poems we will be making our fullest use of
Barfield's perspective, and we will ourselves be moving be-
yond a dualistic understanding of the differences between
Whitman and Eliot.

Whitman's Song Of Myself and Eliot's The Waste Land,

 

two long central poems by these writers, provide a full op-
portunity to compare their goals and their accomplishments.
Both poems develop a concept of how man and his world are
related; and both present a theory of time, a perspective

on death, and a philosophy of language and its relation to

53

all of these questions. A general explication of both sug-
gests that they are directly opposed on these fundamental

issues. The Waste Land presents a fragmented and frustrat-

 

ing world, while Song of Myself strives for a sense of the

 

unity and meaning in the world. In Song of Myself death

 

is temporary and not threatening. In The Waste Land it is

 

final and the ultimate threat. In Song of Myself life is

 

vital, sensual, and full of possibilities. In The Waste

 

Land life is empty, dulling to the senses, and without pos-

sibility. In Song of Myself man seems capable Of continu-

 

ally transcending the boundaries Of reason and logic and
participating in an equally real world of intuition and

imagination. In The Waste Land man is totally contained

 

first by his geographical world and second by his own skin
because language and the senses do not make imaginative
contact with the world. The only hope for minimal under-

standing in The Waste Land seems to rest in rational intro-

 

spection.
The poses Of the two speakers at the conclusions
of the poems highlights their opposition. In the final

part of The Waste Land, "What the Thunder Said," the speaker

 

describes the question of whether or not to act as a trap:
not to act is to live in emptiness, but to act is to give
in to your destructive impulses, creating a situation you

cannot recover from:

54

The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract (404-405)

In words like "surrender" and "prudence" the speaker refers
to sex, declaring it evil and empty. Sex, of course, is
one of the primary ways Whitman describes the experience

he advocates. At the conclusion of Song of Myself the
speaker invites us to take a journey with him. Despite

the risks he has described, he prepares for action. "Now
the performer launches his nerve, he has pass'd his pre-
lude on the reeds within" (section 42, p. 75), he says.

We understand that he is describing a journey within and
beyond the poem, a journey of the spirit and the body, and
that he hopes to arrive at a new level of understanding.
But whether he achieves his destination or not this speaker,
with his decision to act, is in striking contrast to the

speaker at the end of The Waste Land, who remains paralyzed

 

by fear.
Despite this high degree of difference in the ex-
plicit conclusions of the two poems, however, there is a

point in Song of Myself, section thirty-three, where the

 

speaker of that poem moves close to the perspective which

dominates The Waste Land. At this point in the poem the

 

speaker moves from the "I see" stance of earlier in the
poem to the "I am" stance of the remainder of his song.
Instead of "witnessing" and "waiting" or instead of "absorb-

ing" all into himself he becomes the participants Of the

55

experiences he imagines for us. Before, he sat down with
the runaway slave. Now, he says, "I pp the hounded slave"
(italics mine, L1). The risk of assuming this stance Of
closer identification becomes clear as the catalog of peo-
ple and experiences shifts from the usual or joyful exam-
ples to examples of suffering. It is through this identi-
fication with suffering that the poet finally meets the
full implications Of accepting his physicality and his ex-
istence within the world of men. In his effort to triumph
over this world he must come to terms with it rather than
turn away from the dangers of it, and he must eventually
have come face to face with suffering and the threat of
death. It would not have been enough to declare his con-
fidence; that confidence must be earned through experience.
Sharing in this experience is also a necessary stage for
the reader if he is to understand Whitman's invitation
fully. It is neither a blind declaring that life is pleas-
ant, nor a shallowly romantic declaration that the spirit
is all.

As the list of suffering extends itself, however,
the poet begins to flow away from his central purpose and
is in danger of being entirely caught in suffering. But

he shouts at last:

Enough! enough! enough!
Somehow I have been stunn'd. Stand back!
Give me a little time beyond my cuff'd head,
slumbers, dreams, gaping,
I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.
(69)

56

His mistake would be to become overwhelmed by this suffer-
ing. It is necessary for him to accept this part of ex-
perience, but now he will try to move on to a perspective
which incorporates the joyful and the painful. By accept-
ing both fully he creates a new possibility for understand-
ing. This possibility and the potential in language for
sharing it with his reader is the "supreme power" with
which he feels "replenish'd" (38).

I believe that in this section of Song of Myself

 

the speaker approaches the perspective of The Waste Land

 

and then moves on. Whether this speaker experiences and

goes beyond the perspective of The Waste Land, or whether

 

he backs Off and fails to achieve the same level of under-

standing as in The Waste Land are questions which come to

 

mind, but which are better asked in light of the use of
language in the two poems. And, when we study this use of
language I believe gp£_perspective will be altered so that
the questions will no longer be raised in these terms. In-
stead of showing the strength in one poem and a weakness

in the other, this passage of suffering in Song of Myself,

 

I believe, offers clues to the deeper experience which the

two poems share. In this part of Song of Myself and

 

throughout The Waste Land we learn that the understanding

 

the poems seek cannot be achieved without accepting the
full implications of the material world, and this involves

suffering. And yet, explicitly at the end of Song of Myself

 

57

and implicitly in the language of both poems we learn that
suffering may lead to understanding.
As we approach the language in the two poems, how-

ever, the results at first emphasize the difference between

 

the worlds dramatized in the poems. The language of each
seems to strive for exactly Opposite effects on their
readers. It is necessary for us to enter our study Of
their language by this door, the door through which at
first their difference is even more clearly revealed. For,
only by winding farther and farther along this path, exam-
ining their language for its effects, can we arrive at the
point where, with a slight turn of the evidence we might
cast all that has gone before in a somewhat new slant, a
slant which reveals a profound shared experience between
the two poems. This shared experience includes their hav-
ing the pgpg attitude toward language, and it involves
their sharing in complementary ways in a probe for new con-
sciousness.

The first words of Song of Myself richly suggest

 

the content and technique of the whole poem. In declaring,
"I celebrate myself, and sing myself" the speaker asserts
the spirit of celebration and rejoicing, and he seeks to
express in language the imaginative power of song. His
focus is on the self and the imaginative potential of the
self. He also includes our-selves, the readers, in addi-

tion to his-self as poet:

58

And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to
you. (3)

The poem is a search for what it celebrates, the full po-
tential of the self. And the poem continually attempts to
persuade the reader to assume what the poet assumes, and

to invite the reader into a special kind of relationship
with the poet. At this point it is perhaps not so differ-
ent from all other poetry which at least implies an invita-
tion to the reader to explore the self of the poet and to
assume what he assumes. However, even this early there are
clues in the language that Whitman means the invitation in

an exceptional way. The word celebration suggests a thor-

 

ough and ceremonial joy that begins to specify gt§t_we are
being invited to assume. And, in the all-inclusiveness of
the phrasing about what we share with the poet we get a
further clarifying. "Every atom" that "belongs" to him

also "belongs" to us. Everything is shared, and shared so

 

completely that the poet and his readers both own it.
The simpler words in this Opening part also suggest
the character of the invitation; it is physical and sensu-

OUS :

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease Observing a spear of
summer grass. (1)

In the two words "I loafe" nearly a whole scene is created--

in the vision of sprawled limbs of someone leaning

59

nonchalantly. And "observing" is a way of seeing carefully
that may be done at our leisure. The second of these two
lines becomes a physical example of what we are being in—
vited to do as it draws on and on in a leisurely way. It
could have been brief; we could have merely "seen the
grass." But this speaker chooses to be at his ease "Ob-
serving a spear of summer grass." The sensuous invitation
to join the poet is also heightened by the alliteration
with "s" in the first line which emphasizes the parallelism
and sharedness of the poem, and by the alliteration of the
lilting, relaxing "1" sound Of the last two lines.

In terms of the world that is dramatized there
could hardly be a more distinctly different opening from

Song of Myself than the one we find in The Waste Land.

 

From "I celebrate myself" we move to "April is the cruel-
lest month," from celebration to despair. Just as Whitman's
line is total in its joyfulness, Eliot's is complete in its
suggestion of hopelessness. The traditional month of hope
is not simply disappointing, but it is the "cruellest"
month of all. The word SEES; expresses a strong sense of
life's harshness. Life could be "sad" or even "depressing"
before it would have descended to the state where we think
of it as actively SEEEl° The clash between the words éEEil
and 25321 in the opposition of their suggestiveness creates
a friction in this first line and also a sense of betrayal--

for both the speaker and reader the promise of April is

60

betrayed by its joining with the word cruel. In these
opening few lines we also learn that winter is kind because
it makes us "forgetful." Things are so bad that it helps

a little just to forget. The remainder of Eliot's opening
passage is also devoted to developing a sense of the dead-

ness of life:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kepts us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers. (1-7)

This passage too is interwoven with careful alliterative
patterns. "Month" is tied to the act of "mixing/Memory"
with desire, linking April to confusion. And "cruellest"
is linked to "Lilacs" and the "land" through the repeated
"l"s, undermining the beauty of lilacs and the promise of
the land in spring. The thudding "d" Of the first four
lines, and picked up again in line eight helps create the
feeling of death and harshness which the sense of the words
also presents. In line five the importance of "Winter" is
that it keeps us "warm." Binding these two words together
syntactically and alliteratively emphasizes the paradox--
winter ought to make us cold. But the main function of the
language and alliteration here is to help create a feeling
of things being dead and hopeless.

Barfield, while choosing not to draw the issues

surrounding the sound of poetry into his discussion in

61

general, does affirm in passing that there is an imagina-
tive power in sound as in the meaning of words. Speaking
particularly of rhyme but also referring to alliteration

and assonance, he says the effects of sound:

. . . may well remind us how much, how very much, is
possible to the human imagination, once it has begun
to drink, with fuller consciousness, from the primal
source Of Meaning. It would be pure fantasy to
attempt to prescribe in advance what uses man himself
shall henceforth make of the material element of lan-
guage. (32, 151)

It is in the feelings, sensory and emotional, aroused by
the sounds in these passages from Song of Myself and The

Waste Land that we get some early clues to the similarity

 

in their use of language. They both use language to
achieve mood, but they also use language to draw readers
into the poem. And we can explore the nature of the
reader's involvement in both poems as we look further at
their language.

A central poetic tool for both Whitman and Eliot,
and one which they seem to use in very different ways, is
the tagg_. Even though their imagery causes different ef-
fects in us on one level, however, we can see that the lan-

guage draws us into experiencing both kinds of images in a

 

similar way. The worlds the images dramatize are very dif-
ferent, but the experience we have with the language of
both is somewhat similar.

A key quality of the imagery in Song of Myself is

the ability of some images to create a powerful sensory

62

experience but at the same time to transcend sensory bound-
aries. A scene in section five between the poet and his

soul--described as two lovers--is one example:

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer
morning,

How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently
turn'd over upon me.

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged
your tongue to my bare-stript heart,

And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till
you held my feet. (5)

What happens between the lovers is not quite possible phys-
ically. A tongue cannot be shoved through someone's chest
to the heart. But the poet fulfills the promise of sen-
sual experience in this passage by the way he presents the
scene. We are gradually drawn into the scene as each line
extends the action of the last, and as the action builds
in intensity. The scene is generally introduced in the
first line. Then it becomes more specific as the exact
arrangement of the lovers is presented in the second line.
We sensorily respond to the suggestion of the head turning
on our hip, and our shirt being parted, opening our chest
to the air--the shirt parted from the "bosom-bone" as if
our very flesh were parted--and we are drawn in fully at
the suggestion of the cool, wet tongue pressed strongly
against the chest. It is impossible, and yet we feel al-
most the painful sensation of the tongue touching our
heart. Our senses jump wildly under the hypnotic sugges-

tion.

63

Our feeling that more than a sensory event is tak-
ing place in this action is also quickly seized on by the
poet as in the next lines he moves from sensuality to dis-

covery:

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and
knowledge that pass all argument Of the earth,

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of
my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of
my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers,
and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love, (9)

The vitality and concreteness of the lovers' scene is not
lost in this discovery because it occurs as if it were a
physical "rising up" and "spreading" around us, the dis-
covery itself taking on the sensory qualities of smoke or
air. The discovery is briefly elaborated on, and then its
hold on physicality is completed as the section ends with
images of concrete things the poet feels linked to through
his experience and subsequent discovery.

The diction, syntax, and line length all play a
role in the successful communication of this experience t9
a reader and in successfully involving the reader $2 the
experience. The sense of the action extending and extend-
ing is communicated as each line extends the sense of the
last, and as each line focuses in more precisely on the
scene. Finally, in the third of these lines, the line it-

self goes on and on past the usual ending place Of lines

64

in this passage as the tongue extends on through the chest
to the heart. And in this line the suggestiveness Of the
word "plunged" and the description "bare-stript heart"
creates a feeling of intense and daring action, of plunging

onward. Presenting the discovery partially as an image too

 

allows the poet to blend discovery and image in the central
statement of this passage, "And that a kelson of the crea-
tion is love." The kelson is central to the support of the
ship and the source of a primary stability. And the feel-
ing of that support and stability is tpg_love relates to
the understanding the poet is striving for.

It is common in Song Of Myself for line length to

 

be an important influence on rhythm and mood of experience,
and for passages to move from sensual exploration Of the
concrete into a general recognition and then back into the
concrete as in this passage about the lovers, representing
the poet and his soul. In the last move to concrete ima-
gery there is the increased depth added by the general in-
sight. Lines tend to be short when an important generali-
zation is offered, or when a new scene is being introduced;
and lines tend to race on longer and longer as a scene in-
creases in intensity of feeling or action.

The image is equally central to Eliot's The Waste
BEES! but the images are designed to dramatize a different
world. Often the images are part sensory and part discur-

sory explanation. In much of the poem the images do not

65

build unified scenes but instead glance off of one another
disjointedly, suggesting a disjointed world. There are two
primary ways imagery is developed for these effects in 3gp
Waste Land. One method is the isolating of particular
images so that they are neither very far developed in
themselves nor do they relate to one another in any usual

way. Early in Part I the poem uses this type of imagery:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only,
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the crickets

no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock. (19-25)

There are specific elements to this scene, and we experi-
ence at least some of these elements vividly with our
senses. But they are carefully separated from one another.
by commas, and they are not modified by words or phrases
that might further particularize them or relate them to

one another. What modifying that does take place has to do
with characterizing them as threatening (the roots clutch),
or as dead; or they are described by what they do ppt Offer:
shelter, relief, or water. Any natural life they may have
had is not developed, and any natural relationships that
might have been suggested are left unrepresented. They are
a "heap of broken images." And in the words broken, dpgd,

and dry rests the nature of the world as the speaker sees

66

it. This world is fragmented, lifeless, and made up of
unfulfilled dreams. These are what have captured the
speaker's attention, and what seem to him to represent
reality.

In the opening of Part II Eliot accomplishes a
somewhat different feeling from the starkness of the
"roots" passage. Here the scene is so elaborately set
that it is very difficult to see just what it looks like.
We are aware of many things glittering blindingly at us.
Whitman asserts full confidence in the potential for find-
ing the spiritual in the concrete, but here in The Waste
.pgpg we are smothered in particularities, drowned in
glitter and glass. We can identify with the decorative
cupid in the scene, who will not look at it. And yet
there is an intensity to our experiencing of this scene
and of the "roots" passage that is not explained by our

looking at it in this way:

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out

(Another hid his eyes behind his wings)

Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as

The glitters of her jewels rose to meet it,
From Satin cases poured in rich profusion; (4)

Gradually the syntax becomes so contorted that it is very
difficult to understand what item or part of the room is

being described. In the second line the phrase "where the

67

glass" seems about to describe the marble floor, but in-
stead "Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines"
follows, which describes the location of the glass. In-
stead Of then completing a description of where the glass
is, however, the next line describes the vines by noting
that a cupid peeks out from them. Finally, the sixth line
returns to the glass, but somewhat confusingly it is now
described by what and how it reflects. Whereas in the
"roots" passage there were numerous commas and few descrip-
tive words so that it emphasized isolation; in this passage
there are commas only in the first two lines after which
the descriptions tend to run together creating clutter.
However, in neither scene does anything actually happen.
The scenes and the situations simply exist; they are pas-
sively and disturbingly disconnected from people, action,
or even other scenes. The images do give us sensory sug-
gestions, but what we see in this and in the "roots" pas-
sage comes to us like a disturbing surrealistic painting,
in flashes and fragments, controlled by mood.

The language of the two poems seems at this level
to strive for nearly Opposite effects. Whitman's language
expresses sights and sensations, and a vitality and unity
between man and the world. Whitman's language explores
for the general discovery within the concrete world. His
words try to express relationships beyond purely material

relationships. The words try to relate images to one

68

another and to the discoveries which grow out of these re-

lationships. The Waste Land, on the other hand, relies on

 

fragmented and confusing images, unclear abstractions, un-
expressive or threatening verbs, laborious or cluttered
syntax, and in general a language which raises precise and
powerful feelings but which seems extreme in its impreci-
sion in all other ways.

The different worlds dramatized by the two poems
is further established by their overall structures. In
Song of Myself there is no narrative thread running through
the poem tying it together in a story. However, we feel at
all times engaged in a dialogue with the speaker, and we

can recognize the progress of that dialogue. In The Waste

 

9229 there is neither a narrative nor a speaker which runs
throughout the poem. Instead there are a series of speakers
who are seemingly unrelated to one another, and who often
interrupt one another. At times, particularly in Part II,
"A Game of Chess," it is not even possible to tell who is
speaking.

Yet we are not finally confused by The Waste Land,

 

nor are we left unmoved in our response to it. The diction,
syntax, line length, and images of the poem work effectively.
If verbs are relatively rare, that serves to emphasize the
inactive nature of life as the speaker experiences it,

which means that the gptdg of the poem are ttlty expressive.

What the poem communicates with great clarity is the state

69

of the speakers' minds--they are confused and disturbed--
and the poem also shows the relationship these speakers
have with language. For them language is a frightful
puzzle which they awkwardly labor over in order to try to
sort things out. But, seemingly by its very nature--as
they use it--language is confused and confusing. To make
even the barest progress with it requires endless clarifi-
cation, to which end they stack endless clarifications on
top of one another in their speech.

But for the poet of The Waste Land language is a

 

very different thing. Language creates these speakers and
their world for a reader, and then it draws a reader into
experiencing that world. The way the language invites us
to experience images and then prevents us from fully and
comfortably experiencing them creates an almost physical ”'
tension in us as we read. By frustrating our attempts to
sort out or fully link images to one another the poet
creates i2 pp the sense of frustration his speakers also
feel. And by vividly creating their frame of mind the
poet helps us to experience these speakers in more than a
factual way. We feel something of their suffering and sad-
ness through speaking the way they speak as we read their
lines, and also through the emptiness which follows each of
their attempts to communicate. The speakers are trapped

inside of dualistic consciousness. For them there is no

reality except material reality and no truth but logic, and

70

the horror they are experiencing results from their recog-
nition of this and their recognition that this world is
without meaning, since it has no meaning beyond material
existence. The speakers search for answers in their mater-
ial world: in sex, through clairvoyantes, through words,
or glitter; but they learn the futility of seeking answers
as everywhere they turn they find desolation and they find
themselves cut off from one another. Their language too

is contained in the world of dualism and cannot help them.
They are entirely trapped. It is 22E full recognition Of
this (and the way the poem causes this recognition) which
is part of our relationship with the poet, however. And
sharing so fully in his sense of the potential of dualism
to become a trap involves us intellectually and emotionally.
It is at this level, as we Observe how deeply both poems
involve the reader, that we begin to see that The Waste

Land and Song of Myself are not opposite experiences.

 

Whitman involves his reader by the way he weaves
words and experience inextricably together, and by the way
he demonstrates the power of words to suggest a potential
for ecstasy in life: ecstasy through sex, through aesthet-
ics (listening to music, for example), and ecstasy through
personal relationships. He succeeds in reminding us Of

this potential for ecstasy because he partially recreates

 

the experience through language. There is a rhythm and

sound in our vocalizing his language which sensorily

71

suggests touching, or seeing, or which emotionally suggests
celebration. We feel involved physically with the words.

In the passage between the lovers (or poet and soul) in
section five the word plunged is a richly suggestive word
(suggestive Of physical abandon); as a word it involves the
parts of our mouth in a series of three different kinds of
contact in the sounds of "pl," "nge," and "d." If there is
not a sense Of plunging in that, there is at least a demand-
ing physical-ness in our saying the word (of course there

is some of this in all words, but this is exactly the point
Whitman makes in a spectacular way with key words like
plunged). And, I have already discussed how the extended
line in this scene also draws us physically tptg the experi-
ence. Finally in this scene the poet interweaves words,
sensory experience, and abstract discovery so closely that
they will not be sorted back out again. Participating in
these qualities of the scene all at once, and experiencing
them as richly interrelated is an experience beyond a dual-
istic context. We do not reason and then draw conclusions.

We do not experience this scene as out there; we become in-

 

termingled with the scene, experiencing it on several levels
all at once. By showing that there ii this potential in the
material world, and by using words to draw us into this ex-

perience, as a demonstration of the experience, Whitman is

 

probing with language for a general consciousness beyond

dualism. This consciousness he does not fully explain--

72

and he perhaps does not fully know--but he shows how lan-
guage can point toward the possibility of this conscious-
ness nevertheless.

In Eliot's poem too, language is a probe. In the
world dramatized in the poem language is limited to dual-
istic expression, but the poem itself probes dualism to its
depths, draws us into the poem--and into the feeling of
participating in a hysterical search for meaning, and a
feeling of frustration when we do not find it. As we speak
the lines our senses and our curiosity are aroused, but
then we find the words garbled and frustrating; and we find
ourselves alternately wearied by the slow sounds and unre-
lenting starkness or crowded by the unsorted clutter of
other sounds and images. Our attempt to visualize this
world fully is thwarted; our attempt to speak the words
through into clarity breaks down as people interrupt one
another and drive speech into chaos. We have some of the
physical and emotional experiences of a person living in
the world the poem dramatizes. And because we are partly
ip_the world of the speakers of the poem we have a special
relationship with the poet, and a deep sense of his concern
for us and of his faith in words. We are involved in this
world physically, intellectually, and emotionally, as we

are in the world of Song of Myself. And this involves us

 

in more than a dualistic relationship with the poet, as

well as showing us some of the ways words may be used to at

73

first break down dualistic expectations, and then create
relationships so involving that they move beyond dualistic
possibilities.

In trying to choose between The Waste Land and Song

 

of Myself we modern readers have been on the verge of mak-

 

ing our usual mistake. This tendency to choose comes from

the spectrum idea of modern poetry and from the dualistic

 

notion that two things which are different cannot be re-
lated. The difference in the worlds dramatized in the
poems adds to this tendency, making the temptation to
choose nearly irresistible. However, not only is there no
need to choose, but if we choose, we miss the heart of the
accomplishment of language in both poems. What is the
meaning of this situation in which the poems are at oppo-
site extremes and yet involve the reader on the same level?
It does not mean that the poems are the ggmp. Rather they
are neither opposite nor the same, they are in a relation-
ship of polarity to one another. One has not succeeded
where the other has failed. Of course they do not in any
usual logical sense EEEEE in their ideas. But they both
use language imaginatively and involve us as readers in an
imaginative probe for a solution to the dilemma of modern
consciousness.

Eliot's poem shows how sound and meaning can create
emotion in a reader. And it shows how diction and syntax

can be used to break down logical expectations, causing

74

frustration and--at a second stage--sadness. And in the
move from logic to frustration there is a moving closer to
the poem. Logic was our distancing device (it was the way
we kept up our dualistic relationship to the poem), and
now that we are robbed of logic we find ourselves at the
same time closer to the poet and to the experience of the
poem. For us as readers the world of dualism has been
swept aside. And implicit in this experience is that we ./
and language have the ability to establish relationships
which are at the same time closer and more unified than
dualism allows, and beyond dualism in understanding--we
see what dualism fully is, but we also see a possibility
for more in life.

Whitman's language helps thrust him--with his full
being--into the concrete world, helping him establish more
than an Observer-Observed relationship with that world.

As he draws us also into experiencing the world through
his words we find ourselves also living his poem in a very
real intellectual and emotional sense also. We find ab-
stract discovery not by logically arriving at it, but the
words fuse the concrete and the abstract together--it is
in the experience of life for the poet, and $2 the experi-
ence Of the words of the poem for us that the abstract has
meaning. The words powerfully interweave these elements
of life without reducing sensory experience to the logical

realm and without denying sensory experience in order to

75

arrive at the spiritual realm. Whitman's poem suggests
that understanding must come through the lived moment (not
simply through logical thought), and that the imaginative
fusing of words can both create a lived moment and describe
qualities of this understanding it offers. In this way it
partially points the way toward new consciousness.

Both poems drive their way into the heart of dual-
istic perception, deliberately creating through language
an experience at the edge of dualistic understanding. Both
poems stand at the gates of a new realm of consciousness.
To pass into that realm I believe we will need both Eliot's

ability to break down our tendency to have logical expecta-

 

tions, and the tendency to View our world as out there; and

 

Whitman's ability to fuse the concrete and the abstract, to
recognize an imaginative bond between them. The disinte-
grating of our dualistic attitude can probably only take
place, as Eliot's poem implies, through a full experiencing
of dualism and a full recognition of its limitations. And
the discovery of how we can use our imaginations to de-
scribe a new realm of understanding will surely require
finding ways to thrust our full beings into experience and
also finding ways to imaginatively work with language to
recreate that experience, to fully communicate it. This is
the lesson in the language of both Whitman's and Eliot's
poems. Both poems are engaged, at their deepest level, in

the same search; and they are complementary to one another

76

in a profound way, a way that we do not commonly even con-
sider in our dualistic terminology. With the emphasis on

breaking down in one and the emphasis on bringing together

 

 

in the other (and the implicit moving closer to the reader
in both) they are, in a way, a unified experience. If we
are to use them to understand the nature of modern litera-
ture, and if we are to use them to move beyond dualism as
a society we must allow that, using the imaginative poten-
tial they create together to seek new understanding our-
selves. We must use language as they and Barfield teach
us, as an imaginative tool, and as an essential part of
ourselves.

Perhaps the accomplishments Of the two poems as I
have been describing them do not seem so very different
from the usual poetic accomplishments. After all few have
ever argued that poetry was limited to the material world.
In fact poetry and the poetic accomplishment is often de-
fined as a language experience which transcends purely ma-
terial or logical frameworks. It is true the accomplish-
ments of Whitman and Eliot are not so very different from
this usual poetic accomplishment. In a way theirs is the
direction perhaps in which all of poetry points, some more
profoundly than others. However, there is sgpg difference.
Rarely has a realm of reality been challenged so directly
and so powerfully in poetry. Eliot's poem is not a shallow

presentation of the disintegration of materialism, nor a

77

superficial announcement about it; rather it creates a full

and involving experience gt it. And Whitman's poem is not

 

a light emotional moment with nature. Rather it struggles
with high energy to fuse nature and mind, to bind them al-
most electrically through language. Rarely have poets
written as richly and powerfully as Whitman and Eliot; and
it is partly in the richness of their use of language that
its potential is revealed. But it is not necessary to
prove that they are completely different from other poets.
Perhaps all of modern poetry (at least) might be described
as in a general relationship of polarity, the two poles
perhaps being most easily recognized as Whitman and Eliot,
but not necessarily described in terms of them. If the
work Of Whitman and Eliot can help us to understand ttts
relationship it is worth pursuing for that understanding
alone.

The questions raised by "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"
and "Gerontian" about language are not entirely answered.
I have not established whether language can do all that
Whitman implies that it can in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,"
though Barfield, Whitman, and Eliot have provided a way of
seeing that shows that language is pgt limited purely to ’
the material realm which the Old man of "Gerontion" says
that it is. As we have rejected the Old man's claim about
language, however, we have done so by discovering that

there is more to language as the speaker of "Gerontion"

78

uses it than he claims for language explicitly. This para-

 

dox extends through The Waste Land, where again the experi-
ence of the reader belies the claim that language is cut
off from experience. Though no such paradox exists in

Whitman, we discover as we participate in Song of Myself

 

that the poem is a search for what it declares; and the
poet tells us that the search continues on beyond the ex-
perience of his poem.

Out Of the paradox between dramatized vision and

the accomplishment of language in The Waste Land--as the

 

speakers describe a world in which it is impossible to find
meaning, though pg find meaning in our relationship with
the poem through its language--Eliot explored further at-
tempting to bring vision and language closer together. He
most nearly achieved that uniting of these elements in his

later masterpiece, the Four gpartets. That poem presents

 

Eliot at another point within the polarity, and further
makes the case that Whitman and Eliot are more closely re-
lated than the spectrum idea assumes. In some Of his later
poetry Whitman tried to extend the language and vision of
Song of Myself by focusing on the fundamental material lim-
itation of man, his mortality. The most important of these
later poems on death are "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rock-
ing" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."

We would not expect any of these poems to solve the

question of what language can do, or answer all of the

79

questions between us and new consciousness. Barfield has
demonstrated that the understanding of consciousness re-
quires profound searching and far more than simply intel-
lectual discoveries--it involves a steady groping with our

whole beings. And we have discovered from The Waste Land

 

and Song Of Myself also that the achievements of language

 

are a subtle and elusive thing to study--the outer limits
of language potential is a most difficult place to arrive
at. But these later poems of the two writers might be par-
ticularly helpful in further pointing the way, since in
them the language achievements of the two poets seem not
only to continue in their relationship of polarity, but

also to converge toward one another.

CHAPTER IV

THE SWAMP, THE DESERT,
AND THE WORLD BEYOND

Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"
and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" represent
a very sobering confrontation with death. Like the £225
Quartets they are fairly reserved statements, though all
three app positive statements. All three also give the
feeling of thrashing about for solutions. They resist
easy and unsatisfying solutions and instead engage in the
painful struggle for understanding. And, finally all three
achieve a measure of peace through increased understanding,
an understanding which has at its center the absolute ne-
cessity of accepting all of life: the material and spir-
itual, the happy and sad, and the beginnings and endings--
of each experience and of life itself. To arrive at this
understanding they all use language somewhat agonizingly,
emphasizing the imperfectness of language as a tool for
overcoming powerful suffering. However, all of them use
language as an attempt tg overcome its own imperfectness
as well as to help them solve the other problems present

in each poem. And, in each, language is equal to the task,

80

81

bringing understanding, a state of calm, and a determina-
tion to move on into new experience living life as fully
as possible.

The converging toward one another which takes
place in this later poetry of Whitman and Eliot is by no
means a completed process. Rather it is simply a direc-

tion and tendency in the poems. The Four Quartets move

 

away from the desolate world dramatized in "Gerontion" and

The Waste Land toward a more positive vision. And this in-

 

volves a moving of the dramatized world $2 the poem closer
to the world created for a reader in the language. This
seems to be a response by Eliot to the paradox created be-

tween language and vision in The Waste Land. The merging

 

of vision and language and their reserved nature perhaps
places the Quartets toward the center of the polarity of
Whitman's and Eliot's poems. Certainly it is at a differ-

ent point within the polarity than either The Waste Land

 

or Song of Myself.

 

"Out of The Cradle" and "Lilacs" strive to assert

what Song of Myself asserts about death. But in these

 

later two poems there is much more of an emphasis on the
struggle involved in this search. It is the disturbing
nature of the problem rather than the exciting potential
for transcending it which occupies the main body of the
poems. They do not represent a failure to achieve what Sgpg

of Myself achieves, however; they represent an experience

 

82

different from Song of Myself which is necessary if the

 

perspective of Song of Myself is to be carried successfully
through a direct confrontation with death. These two later
Whitman poems occupy yet another point within the polarity--
actually two points, in that they differ somewhat from one

another. Where Song of Myself asserts powerfully its tri-

 

umph and unity, and where The Waste Land deliberately ex-
ploits the potential in language for fragmentation, these
three poems all grope within language for its potential to
face fully the harshest implications of dualism and Of ma-
terial reality. The Fou£:guartets struggles to break the
bonds of logic and linear time. "Out Of the Cradle" and
"Lilacs" struggle to confront and accept physical death.

Within the first twelve lines of the Fouryguartets

 

two of its fundamental qualities are introduced. The open-
ing lines present a paradoxical description of time; the

paradox is to be a central tactic Of this poem:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable. (I, 1-5)

The paradox Of all time being the same is one central re-
curring paradox of the poem; the other central paradox is
introduced at the beginning of "East Coker," the second of
the Quartets, where in the first line the speaker says,

"In my beginning is my end." By the end of "East Coker"

83

this paradox has been reversed to read, "In my end is my
beginning.". This second version presents the relationship
of the concepts more hopefully since now the idea has to

do with continuous beginnings instead of continuous endings,
but this paradox and the one about time remain to be more
fully clarified as the poem unfolds.

The challenge these paradoxes must face in the
poem come from the waste land vision, which is still very
much a part of the poet's experience. Structurally, Egg
Waste Land imagery becomes a recurring reference point in
this poem, almost like the "Unreal City" is a reference

point in The Waste Land itself. In the Quartets the re-

 

minders of the waste land vision are reminders of what
must be faced up to and transcended if we are to find the
still point, the point where we understand Egg all time is
one and how beginnings and endings are interrelated.

Very early in "Burnt Norton," the first Quartet,

memories of The Waste Land are called up, but the purpose

 

of this seems to be to show how the Quartets are different
in tone and purpose from that poem. In line twelve there
is a reference to "the passage we did not take/ Towards the
door we never Opened" especially reminding us of the "key
in the door" passage of the final part of The Waste Land.
Just a couple of lines later further memories are called

up as the speaker questions the meaning and worth of action:

84

But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know. (117)

There is a gentleness in these lines which was not present

in The Waste Land. The first passage suggests that the

 

speaker is now going toward the door, apparently to Open
it--something that was utterly impossible for the speakers

of The Waste Land. And the second, though it questions

 

the meaning of action, carries none of the desperate in-

 

tensity of The Waste Land's "awful daring of a moment's
surrender" (49).

Our sense that the speaker is still very much oc-
cupied by the world of the waste land is further estab-
lished by images of desolation in this opening part. Egg

Waste Land might also have had an "empty valley," a

 

"drained pool," and "dry concrete" (118). But again that
world is tempered significantly. The sun clears overhead,
"And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight" (118).
This reserved but hopeful mood does not dominate this long
poem, but it defines the middle or balance of the pendulum
swing of moods in the poem. In general the Foupyguartets
is a poem of struggle, both for understanding and for ex-
pression. There are moments where the potential for ec-
stasy is assured, if not experienced, but throughout the
painstakingness of the struggle is the controlling feeling.
Finally the poem achieves a restrained, yet joyful sense

that in the world of The Waste Land there is now hope for

 

understanding.

85

The particular probing of the Quartets seems to be
an attempt to find how the language of dualism can describe
experiences beyond dualism. Through a negative process Of

breaking down the dualistic world, The Waste Land expressed

 

some of the qualities of a realm beyond dualism. Now the
Quartets strive for a further positive statement of what
ttgt new realm is. There are two stages in this striving
in the Quartets. In the first stage of this poem too the
process of breaking down the world of dualism is important.
For a long time in the poem the paradoxes serve mainly to
break our logical expectations by defeating our natural at-
tempts (natural in the sense that it is something ingrained
in us through our dualistic way of thinking) to make sense
of the poem through logic. This defeat of logical ap-
proaches is at first the function of the paradox as a tac-
tic, and it is the first stage of the poem's exploring for
a further understanding of a new consciousness.

The second stage begins fairly early but is not
finished until the last section. This stage involves the
unraveling of the paradoxes and the attempt to describe
ypgt is understood. Section five of the last Quartet,
"Little Gidding," is where the final and most striking at-
tempt to explain the paradoxes occurs. But this explana-
tion is given its full potential depth through the way the
lparadoxes have been elaborated on in the course of the poem

Eand through experiments in the poem in which the image,

86

that is the concrete experience, is explored for the pos-
sible unities and positive understandings it can reveal.
Section one of the second quartet, "East Coker,"
presents the imagery Of a mirthful marriage dance in medi-
eval language. It is a very simple "Earth feet, loam feet"
dance, but there is a basic goodness in it, and in its im-
plied acceptance of life. The language of the dance is
vivid. The dancers go "Round and round the fire/ Leaping
through flames," or they are "Lifting heavy feet in clumsy
shoes" (124). There is high energy in "leaping," and it
is daringly associated with "flames." And there is a
strong though quieter sensory experience in the words
"heavy" and "clumsy." The iambic meter emphasizes the reg-
ular beat of the dance. This imagery begins to draw us in-
to the experience described, but for the moment the image
is not pressed further to reveal a general discovery or to
draw the reader into the experience in an extended way.
Perhaps at this point the medieval dance imagery simply
vividly represents the past. Section two swings back in

the direction of The Waste Land, exploring the nature of

 

what we are moving from.

In addition to experimenting with the image to see
what it might reveal the poet nearly continuously evolves
variations of his paradoxes, which extend the realms to
which they apply, which emphasize our need to give up logic

in order to understand in a new way, and which also give

87

hints of clarification of the meaning of the central para-
doxes. A point in section III of "East Coker" communicates
through paradoxes that we must not assert a logical connec-
tion between our method of exploring and the conclusions

we arrive at, and that giving up expectations is a way

of opening ourselves to experience:

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession. (127)

The sequence of paradoxes and the repetition of the command,
"You must go" makes the passage intriguing and intense.
Section four of "East Coker" states part of what is happen-
ing with this use of apparent logic which breaks down. We
are warned that our sicknesses must be experienced before
we can be restored (127-128). As we experience the break-
down of logic and the positive potential of the image and
Of the imagination we approach the final understanding of
the poem.

While logic and the breakdown of logic are not
part of the concern or technique which pervades either "Out
Of the Cradle" or "Lilacs" both poems do search for the
link between the language of the image and the language of
discursive thought. The image as a device in these two

poems is pressed for what it might reveal about how death

88

can be faced and overcome. Conquering time, one of the

central goals of the Four Quartets, is a search along these

 

lines, and it has its own kind of intensity. But nowhere

in the poems studied here besides in "Out of the Cradle"

and "Lilacs" is death experienced with such harrowing close-
ness. And the threat of death being so immanent places a
special burden on the language of these poems.

In "Out of the Cradle" the adult speaker begins by
formally evoking the experience in his childhood when he
first fully felt the prospect of death. As he moves past
this evocation into a vivid reminiscence of the scene the

imagery creates a vitality in the experience:

When lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month
grass was growing,

Up this seashore in some briers,

Two feather'd guests from Alabama, two together,

And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted
with brown, (180)

The suggestion of scent in the lilacs and the grass, and
the visual and tactile suggestions of briers concretize

the scene. And as we move in so close to the nest as to
see the markings on the eggs the scene becomes fully indi-
vidualized and infused with life. But, as with the experi-

ence of identifying with suffering in Song of Myself there

 

is a risk in the closeness between the speaker and the ex—
perience, and also a risk in the moving closer of poet and

reader.

89

And this potential risk quickly becomes real as
the boy experiences the death of the female bird in the
image of her solitary mate "flitting from brier to brier."
As the male bird begins his song the speaker declares that
he knows its meaning. But his statement says nothing of
gtgt he knows, so his declaration is very preliminary and
incomplete. The image of death he is so close to has not
been linked to a general or discursive reality which allows
him to understand it. However, in the words he finds to
express the bird's song the poet creates a moment of in-
tense unity between the boy, the bird, and the sea. And
this experience becomes both the boy's first real experi-
ence of death and his discovery that he is going to be a
poet. The opening of the bird's song captures the rhythm

of the sea:

Soothe! soothe! soothe!
Close on its wave soothes the wave behind, (181)

Then the song turns to a desperate calling, "Loud! loud!
loud!" (182). There is a progression of moods which take
the boy, and the speaker, even closer to the experience,
into a somewhat different way of understanding too, though
exactly what this is the speaker seems not yet able to ex-
plain. He commits himself to perpetuating this bird and
his song, but he cannot be more precise yet about what the
images and words of the song reveal about the experience

Of death. His drive to fuse image and understanding in the

face of this scene is not yet complete.

90

In the last stage of the poem, the experience of
death, the words of his poem, and the waves of the sea
come together for the speaker. He no longer declares £21;
knowledge in the abstract, that struggle has not been suc-
cessful. With his acceptance of this fact--that death will
not be fully understood in the abstract--his words turn
again to images. This time the images are not of the scene
expressly, but they use ingredients of the scene to charac-
terize several qualities of death which the boy has experi-

enced:

My own songs awakened from that hour,

And with them the key, the word up from the waves,

The word of the sweetest song and all songs,

That strong and delicious word which, creeping to
my feet,

(Or, like some old crone rocking the cradle,
swathed in sweet garments, bending aside,)

The sea whisper'd me. (184)

Here, in a final turn of the image the boy finds

a view of death which will allow him to move on into fur-
ther experience. Death is the waves creeping up to his
feet, an old crone bending over his cradle, and the central
word of all words. Death has even become tempting in its
deliciousness, but that is kept from overwhelming the boy
through his recognition that though death is a natural part
of experience, other experiences must be similarly accepted.
And his next challenge is to live out the potential he has
begun to discover in words and to seek further understanding

through words, as the "outsetting bard."

91

With the birth of the image of the word death as
a wave "creeping to my feet" the speaker has given the pas-
sage its stability. The answer to what death is must be
found 32 experience. It will not be found in the abstract
thoughts beside the sea, but in experiencing the sea and
in living, death may be partially understood. And that
discovery that the image (and so, the word) has the power
to relate death to the waves, and so to relate death to
life, and the recognition that words may be used in this
way to help us accept death as part of life is the limit
of the discovery this poem achieves. But in that accep-
tance of death and that affirmation of words rests the
ability to continue, living fully and using words to ex-
plore experience for further understanding.

In "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" there
is a similar tension between the speaker's need to express
some general discovery which will unlock the mystery of
death and allow him to overcome his grief and fear of it
and the resistance of words. And here also when he commits
himself to the image and probing it beyond a merely factual
or informational function discovery is possible. As in
"Out of the Cradle" this closeness to the image at first
shows the power of death. As Lincoln's coffin passes, in
section six, a sense of how heavily death hangs over the
scene is contained in the slow moving sentences, the un-

pleasant verbs and the generally quiet, dark imagery:

92

With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour'd
around the coffin,

The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs--where
amid these you journey,

With the tolling tolling bells' perpetual clang,

Here, coffin that slowly passes,

I give you my sprig of lilac. (234)

The word dirges is a strong influence with its harsh sounds
(in the "d" and "g9) and the way it stops us over three
sounds on the tongue before it lets us pass. The "dim-lit
churches" creates both the image of darkness and the feel-
ing of its images, flickering past in four short syllables
as it does. The "shuddering" of the organ characterizes
the grieving sound of the dirge and also suggests that the
organ itself (and so the scene itself) feels the sense of
grief and loss the poet feels. We are drawn into this mo-
ment. The images of the scene and the feelings of the
poet are in the process of merging, but the experience is
not yet providing relief or helpful understanding. The
sprig of lilac seems overwhelmed in the sombreness of the
procession, and so it is at this point.

As he searches for a way to respond to this over-
whelming grief the speaker's diction becomes formal and
his syntax a bit complex and confusing. He addresses the
star, and the bird. But finally, as he considers what to
hang on the walls Of the tomb the poet realizes what vital-
ity he must capture if his pictures (or his song) are to
be an appropriate response to the death Of the vital man

he mourns. In the description of the pictures called

93

for his song begins to recover from its identification

with the sadness of death:

Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes,

With floods Of the yellow gold of the gorgeous,
indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air,
With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale

green leaves of the trees prolific,
In the distance the flowing gaze, the breast of the
river, with a winddapple here and there. (235)

The contrast with the images of the passing coffin is ex-

treme and suggestive. Now there are floods of yellow gpld,

 

where there were only "dim-lit churches." And now the life
in the surroundings is aggressive and vibrant, not shudder-
tpg. The sun is the "gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun" with
the suggestion of human-likeness in the word indolent, and
with the whole phrase rolling out in melodic multi-syllable
words. Having barely sunk the sun bursts to life, rising
in a "burning, expanding" motion. There is a sensory lush-
ness to the scene throughout with its "fresh sweet herbage,"
and its "pale green leaves"; and there is a peaceful, calm
beauty to it too, as we view with the speaker the "breast
of the river, with a winddapple here and there." These
images help the speaker recover somewhat from his fear and
grief. But he still does not have control of his experi-
ence or full understanding of it as he hears a bird's song,
and as in "Out of the Cradle," it becomes a seductive song

of death. The bird sings:

94

Come lovely and soothing death,

Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,

Sooner or later delicate death. (237)

Now death has become an image with life too as it ppgg:
tgtg§--a gentle flowing movement. And death is also serene
and delicate. From being dangerously frightening death has
moved to being dangerously seductive. Both dangers are
part of the speaker's close identification with it, and
part of his willingness to experience it fully and con-
cretely--as vital images which he participates in.

In looking at the image of the dead on a battle-
field the speaker at last gains some release through a
limited recognition. It is not the dead who suffer. They
are "full at rest" (238). It is we who remain who suffer.
The grief and sadness are 225 experience. There are gttgt
experiences with death-~some sense of it as ecstasy, for
example; and there are other experiences of life which we
must accept too if we are to understand any part of experi-
ence as fully as possible. Understanding death as well as
he is able to involves, the speaker realizes, incorporating
all of the experiences he has had in the poem--the identi-
fication of the image with grief, its identification with
vitality, and with ecstasy. Death must be accepted and ex-
perienced as part of life. But if death is to be under-
stood, or if any of life is to be understood, it must be

as a fully lived part of existence and as related to other

95

parts of life. It is in the image that words may bring
the speaker closer to experience. Only through fully par-
ticipating in the variety of images and experiences and
the way they interrelate can he explore further. Through
the tension between concrete experience and general dis-
covery greater understanding can be achieved. 80 the
speaker leaves us with his return to the concrete world,
to his present, and we feel him experiencing this moment
but also now in anticipation of what each new moment will
bring. In the last line though, he remains in ttts experi-
ence standing "There in the fragrant pines and the cedars
dusk and dim" (239).

With the Four Quartets too image drives toward con-

 

tact with explanation of life. In the first part of "The
Dry Salvages," the third quartet, there is a focus on the
river and the sea. Water remains an image for mystery (the
unknown) and for salvation. But the speaker begins to de-
scribe pp! it might be understood more fully, as he shows
several perspectives we might take on it. He explains "The
river is within us, the sea is all about us;/ The sea is
the land's edge also" (130). The speaker seeks a new way
of seeing, an alteration of perception. He sees that the
river is within us as well as out there. The sea is the
sea gpd the edge of the land. In both cases it depends on
223 we see the image and how we use the words whether we

experience the sea and river as one experience or another.

96

Seeing it in a variety of ways seems to be connected to
fuller understanding.

It is in "Little Gidding," the last quartet, where
the image is worked the hardest in the poem and where some-
thing of its vitality is taken into the unraveling of the
paradox of beginnings and endings. In section four of
"Little Gidding" the imagery is shocking, especially in
contrast to the language of the poem as a whole. In the
first two lines, "The dove descending breaks the air/ With
flame of incandescent terror" (143), the dove's plummeting
and bursting to flame is dazzling. Equally vivid is the
way love is characterized as "the hands that wove/ The in-
tolerable shirt Of flame/ Which human power cannot remove"
(144). The sensory experience of this shirt of flames on
the chest is extreme. It seems Offered as a final purify-
ing process as the poet approaches his last statements.

In the last section of the poem a statement of
clarification about the paradox of beginnings and endings
is offered. The paradox may be understood in the framework
of the search, which has been the framework of the whole

poem:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. (145)

This means that the still point is not a place or a time

but §_way gt understandipg. It is not in the future or the

 

. 97

past. It is not beyond life, not purely spiritual. It is
not part of some other world. Rather tt_ts g way pt seeing

experience. And this way of seeing has been described at

 

various points in the poem as: like being a flame, like an
ecstatic moment with music, like the feeling of unselfish
love, and like those moments when language reaches its po-
tential to express both the particularity of things and
also the unity of things. It is a stance toward life in
which we see that the past, present, and future are all
part of one experience, and that all of 1ife--including
death--is related; and we see that in the acceptance of
all of life is a potential for further understanding. ’In
this climactic passage each line anticipates the next, and
the last is the conclusion (syntactically) that the four
together strive for. The brief passage is also rich with
words that create a full sense of what is happening. The
words explore and arrive communicate daring and discovery;

and at last knowing or understanding is possible. Knowing

 

has been the goal for so long in the poem, and for such an
interminable time in Eliot's poetry, that this assurance
comes like the first rain falling in the desert of the
waste land.

In this poem the explanation finally becomes pos-
sible as image and discovery are fused together. As in the
later Whitman poems I have discussed the images refuse to

yield a separate abstract truth. But when the images

98

establish full contact with the speaker a certain poten-
tial becomes apparent, and then when the speaker experi-

ences discovepy gs concretely as his other images and as

 

 

part of that kind of experience it becomes possible for a
greater degree of understanding to be expressed. In the
ending of this poem the images suggested are of the jour-
ney, which is characterized especially by the word explor-
tpg and the reference to arriving. It is exploring we
must continually engage in with our mind, our language,

and our full being in order to gain from language and from
life what they have the potential to give us. Only when
the exploring involves our senses 229 our imagination can
it be fully successful. It is this which the speaker most
clearly and firmly learns at the end of the poem. The ten-
sion between image and statement has given way to a fusing
of the two. This has not revealed all truth, but it has
shown the way for further understanding, understanding be-
yond logic, and beyond dualism. Achieving an understanding
by seeing that image and discovery must be interrelated is

a way of transforming our experience, seeing it new and

 

more fully.

The final moment of explained discovery in all
three of these poems (the Quartets, "Out of the Cradle,"
and "Lilacs") results from a language and perceptual ex-
perience in which the language of vital imagery, and the

experience of vital imagery are fully interrelated with

99

understanding. The understanding is expressed not purely
as a concrete image, but as a blend of sensory and intel-
lectual qualities fused together. And the images are not

of a scene in nature but of gp_experience gt understanding

 

 

which the poet has imagined into existence, out of his con-
crete experience and out of his groping for understanding.
In the main body of the poems there is a tension between
the lived moment and the attempt to explain, but in an
electric moment in each, these two directions become one
and a new level of understanding is achieved. This new
understanding is sufficient to validate going on in life
with new hope, and to create an experience beyond dualism
pointing the way for fuller living.

Though the poems are gpgtt different concerns,
their achievement with language is very much on the same
level. They occupy different points within the polarity.
The Quartets struggle to breakdown logic, and to fuse the
abstract, the image, and the ecstatic experience of the
timeless together; "Out of the Cradle" attempts to recon-
cile the experience of death as the absence of what is
known or of what has been experienced with a positive sense
of death as part of life, and in the process tries to prod
language for a statement--yet the poem succeeds when lan-

guage flows back into the image 12 order t2 make its state-

 

ment; and "Lilacs" attempts to reconcile the sense of death

as destroyer and as indiscriminate reaper with a sense of

100

it as a positive part of life. In "Lilacs" the potential
of words to bring a natural object to the point of seeming
human because of the speaker's close identification with
it, the personifying and vivifying of nature in the poem,
is explored and exploited until the unity between surround-
ings, words, and poet result in a statement through imagery
but not limited to the concrete world. The image has be-
come part of an experience which involves the senses, the
intellect, and the imagination. And in this unity is the
potential for fuller understanding.

The similar conclusions in the language accomplish-
ment of these poems points helpfully toward new conscious-
ness. We see that logic--the only truth of a dualistic
perspective--can be broken down through the paradox as an
approach to central qualities of existence, time and death,
for example. And we see that if we explore deeply enough
into the concrete experience, not allowing ourselves to be-
come lost in it, but probing with our full beings in it and
imaginatively relating to it with language, the concrete
can yield understanding beyond logic and beyond materialism.
Language's role in this search rests, in addition to break-
ing down logic and groping for explanation, in our imagina-
tively applying its ability to bring us into close contact,
or unity, with our surroundings and with others. Because
the poems talk about different concerns, and because lan-

guage is used differently in each, the poems are not the

101

same. But because they point beyond dualism they are not
entirely different either. They participate in similar

searches, as do The Waste Land and Song Of Myself. And

 

 

their search alone takes us into a new realm of understand-
ing, a realm which, however, remains to be further clari-
fied still.

Song of Myself seeks to emphasize and exploit the

 

potential for language to move beyond dualism, whereas The
Waste Land emphasizes how dualism must be (can be, and is)

broken down as an explanation for experience. The Waste

 

Land and Song of Myself are polar experiences, at extremes

 

from one another and distinguishable from one another.

But they are also both essential experiences if the process
of growing beyond dualism into new consciousness is to be
achieved. And this essential search they share, and this
essential understanding they Offer to one another when
viewed together is the nature of their special unity--their

particular polarity. If the entire focus of Song of Myself

 

is forward, and the main focus of The Waste Land is back-

 

ward, still the Four Quartets is right in insisting that

 

broader understanding rests in our accepting £21; knowledge
of our old way of seeing and also in groping for a new way.
Our new understanding is broader both for its full knowl-

edge of where it has been and for its knowledge of some of

the ways it must move on.

102

The different relationship of the speaker to water
in each of the poems is a more concrete and surprisingly
accurate way to assess the point each poem occupies within
the polarity. In these last three poems studied the image
of water offers peace and understanding, but in different
ways. In Whitman's two poems on death the speaker has
gone down to the water for renewal and understanding. In
"Out of The Cradle" the waves of the sea, at first threat-

ening, at last provide the experiencing of the concrete

 

world that leads to calm and understanding. In "Lilacs"

the thrush sings from the "swamp." And, finally, it is
when the general concrete imagery of this poem achieves
something of the lushness of the swamp that the poem re-
news itself, confident in its sense of the fullness of ex-
perience. The Quartets reason about water, and about ex-
perience; but by altering the way it reasons from one point
to the next the poem transcends reason. The sea is the sea
229 the edge of the land. The river is out there gpd’with-
in us. These are attempts to reason toward a new under-
standing; but because the statements are both true and non-
reasonable--because they are paradoxical, and beyond para-
dox in that they can be understood even though they are not
logica1--they transcend reason and the bonds of dualism.
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" perhaps the boldest statement
among these poems extends out literally into the ocean for

its experience (the speaker is on the ferry), and

103

"Gerontion" presents the arid desert. In Song of Myself

 

and The Waste Land again we have the poles of the collec-

 

tive relationship. The Waste Land offers the most extended

 

and the most extreme experiencing of the desert--even the
thunder is sterile, and the speaker is driven to creating

mirages of rain, while Song of Myself thrusts itself

 

wholely into the experiencing of the potential lushness
and fullness of experience, incorporating experiences of
the ocean and the land and in general offering a perhaps
nearly literal swamp of sensual-ecstatic experience to its
readers. In the swamp and the desert are perhaps the meta-
phors for the poles of the polarity we have been studying.
And in both images is a suggestion of their need for each
other and a sign Of a ground of understanding which lies--
not so much between them as in a unity which they might
achieve when joined to one another in our imagination.

The question: How far do these poems take us? is
a most difficult one. None of the poems has created a new
consciousness, nor together even do they achieve that goal.
However, singly to an important degree, and together pro-
foundly, they have focused on the primary issues, and they
have pointed the way language might be imaginatively ap-
plied tO these issues. To be frank, we do not know the
boundaries of language. In several ways these poems have
crossed what we have habitually come to think of as the

boundaries of language. This poetry demonstrates through

104

language that words can engage the intellect and the emo-
tions, and additionally that language can involve a reader
physically (as we speak the words, and as we experience
their effects).

The combination of these involvements, and the com-
bination of experiences in this full involvement may show
us a variety of ways that consciously moving closer to ex-
perience, moving our-selves closer to material reality and
to each other can reveal more of the meaning of experience.
Logic is a valuable tool, but there is a unity in life
which can only be revealed by giving up logical distance
and opening our fuller beings to experience. In language
this may be done partly through the imaginative exploration
of the image as it relates to an important experience or an
important problem. As we move into the experience through
a full sense of the concreteness of it a potential for un-
derstanding is created. This potential can be fulfilled
by maintaining the very difficult balance in which we are
very close to experience but not overwhelmed by it. We are
fully $2 the experience (not outside observing it) but we
are also applying our imagination through language to ex-
plore various aspects of the experience. A combined
opening-up to experience--moving closer to it--and apply-
ing our imaginations to the experience is possible. These
poems achieve such a balance in their best moments. And

they draw the readers into the experience, demonstrating

105

the power of language to achieve the balance by involving
us in it.

I would distinguish one last time between the abil-
ity of all good poems to show something of what it means
to see or live a certain way (to some extent probably all
good poems probe the meaning of consciousness), and what
it means for poems like the ones I have discussed by
Whitman and Eliot to focus unfalteringly on the central
issues raised by the consciousness Of an entire age. And,
though I have made little effort to suggest that the poetry

of Whitman and Eliot is better than other poetry--nor do I

 

think it necessary to claim that now, though of course I
believe their poetry is extraordinary in its accomplish-
ments--I would distinguish between our usual sense that

poems can create emotional or spiritual experiences, and

 

 

the way these poems push language to our modern conceptual
limits.

In accomplishing this much even they achieve part
of Barfield's hopes for poetry,that it might achieve under-
standing beyond dualism; and as we integrate the combined
implications of the works of Whitman and Eliot perhaps this
new understanding on our part will point the way for a new
poetry, which may carry us even further toward a new con-
sciousness. These poems help validate Barfield's claims
for the potential of language--they find meaning and under-

standing in an intense blending of the concrete world with

106

the human imagination. And they may be joined in our un-
derstanding with movements in many other fields toward the
overturning of dualistic consciousness as the exclusive
reality.

It is fitting that science, where dualism and the
scientific method have been so thoroughly wedded, should
be involved in this movement, and that writers in science
like David Bohm and Thomas Kuhn should be among those who
are noticing that there is no such thing as a "neutral ob-
servation language," that what we see is to some important
degree the result of the way we talk about seeing and what
our particular language framework allows us to see. And,
it is fitting that science, a field we have in the mod-
ern age relied on to point out how sophisticated we are
and how quaint people in past ages were, should be a part
of challenging this fundamental error we tend to make.

Once we have gotten over the shock of it, it should
also delight us to realize that to some extent any age's
way of seeing consists of "stories" it makes up to explain
the world to itself. For a time the stories seem like
reality, but then in glimpses we begin to see differently,
and the stories no longer serve so well, and so we create
new stories which "fit" better; and then regrettably we
tend to adopt these stories so completely that once again
the stories seem to be reality. Perhaps in a time like

ours, precisely because it is transitionary in the

107

developing of human consciousness, this tendency to adopt

the new way Of seeing as the whole way may be noted and we

 

may begin to exercise better control so as not to do this,
so that we may utilize both dualism and non-dualism, in-
stead Of seeing all of dualism as if it were mainly
"quaint." Perhaps we might hold on to and try to pass on
the understanding that however we explain reality it is
12st an explanation, and if we are alert to all of our
being the explanations will keep changing. And if in this
changing we remember and use the best of the old way of
seeing there may be a broadening and we may be lucky enough
to gtpg_in our understanding of our world. It was not
wrong for the modern age to reject classical myth as a full
explanation Of reality; it is not wrong for us now to probe
for consciousness beyond dualism. But, if our new con-

sciousness is to be broader and not simply different we

 

must develop the ability to utilize more than the perspec-
tive of one consciousness at one time; the ability to use
our imaginations to flow into and out of different con-
sciousnesses must become a way to experience more of real-
ity. In this age we should not try to return to the world
of myths, nor should we hold on desperately to dualism, but
we should learn from both of these ways Of seeing how the
new way of seeing may incorporate the positive potential

in both and how each can be used to alert ourselves to

parts of experience that the other way of seeing is not so

108

well in touch with. They both ought to be a part of the
new consciousness, and they both ought to be searched in
for the clues they Offer to the developing of this con-
sciousness.

In his own suggestions for solutions to the dilemma
of modern society Barfield sends us to the language of po-
etry and to the works of Rudolf Steiner. If this study re-
turns to the poetry of Whitman and Eliot in anything at all
like the spirit that Barfield intends that would be deeply
rewarding. But even if it falls short of this, if it
serves to increase understanding of this poetry by offer-
ing a slightly different slant I will be happy in the hope
that ttis is a small contribution to human understanding
and to the appreciation of human potential. Let whatever
imagination we possess, and whatever energies we can call
on, at least be spent in this direction.

I would suggest that we take Barfield's advice as
well as we are able. That we pursue his concerns into the
work of Steiner, and that we pursue them into further stud-
ies of poetry and into the writing Of poetry. I believe
that there are signs of a movement in this direction. Cer-
tainly in modern poetry several of the best poets have been
involved in such a movement. Among those of very recent

times Theodore Roethke with his Far Fields and Galway

 

Kinnell with Book of Nightmares are clearly probing lan-

 

guage and thought in ways suggested by the works of Whitman

109

and Eliot, with a focus on the primary issues, with a firm
resistance to facile solutions, and with an imaginative re-
solve to press language to its limits as an aid in this
search. In criticism there seems to be a movement toward
allowing that the several realities a literary work creates
all be considered as valid: from initial emotional response,
to the historical perspective, to the statistical analysis
of its parts; and there is a movement toward unifying these
responses into a whole reality, including the work and the
reader's experience of it.

Perhaps what had most been lacking in this striving
for a whole experience, after the development of the highly
analytical New Criticism, was a personal response, or more
precisely an existential response to the literature. But
much of the better criticism is beginning to incorporate
this perspective. And as this personal perspective again
is allowed rightfully into the classroom it might become
more clear for more students why anyone would want to read
and fully experience works of literature, and how literary
works can relate to growing in our understanding of our

world.

End Notes

lOwen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study

 

in Idolatpy (New York, 1957), p. 11. References to this
henceforth will be listed in the text by §§_and the page
number.

2Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," Complete

Poetry and Selected Prose by Walt Whitman, ed. James E.
Miller (Boston, 1959), p. 116. Subsequent references to
this poem are by section and line number. Later references
to "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and "When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" are references to the poems
as they appear in this text. Those poems begin on pp. 180
and 233 respectively, and are referred to by page number

only.

3Daniel R. Schwarz, "The Failure of Meditation:

The Unity of Eliot's 'Gerontion'," T. S. Eliot, A Collec-

 

tion of Criticism, ed. Linda W. Wagner (New York, 1974),
p. 49. Subsequent references to this essay are by page

number only.

4T. S. Eliot, "Gerontion," T. S. Eliot: The Com-

 

piete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York, 1971), p. 21.

 

Subsequent references to this poem are by line numbers

110

111

only. References to The Waste Land and the Four Quartets

 

 

are to those poems as they appear in this text beginning
on pp. 37 and 117 respectively. Those poems are referred

to by page number only.

5Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of

Art: Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (New York,

 

1953): PP. 237-238.

6Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meanipg
(New York, 1964), p. 109. This is henceforth £2 and the
page number.

7Owen Barfield, History in English Words (Grand

 

Rapids, Mich., 1964), pp. 141-142. Subsequently this text

is referred to by HEW and page number only.

8Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne

 

K. Langer (New York, 1946), pp. 45-46. Subsequently this

text is referred to by page number only.

9Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action:

Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkely, 1966) p.

 

45. Subsequently this text is referred to by page number

only.

112

l°Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thopght, (Middle-

 

town, Conn., 1971), pp. 34-35, and discussed extensively
at other points. See Barfield's index for references to

the term.

11Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, in Whitman's

 

"Song of Myself"--Origin, Growth, Meaning, ed. James E.
Miller (New York, 1964), p. 59. Subsequent references to

this poem are by page number only.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Walt Whitman and American Romanticism

Allen, Gay Wilson. Walt Whitman: A Reader's Guide. New
York, 1970.

For my purposes Allen's sense of the mystical
experience of Song of Myself, the discussion of
Whitman's "epiphanyfigin the poem and the summary
of E. Fred Carlisle's essay on Song of Myself as
a search by the self of the poet are most useful.
Implicit here is the idea that Whitman may be
approached from a variety of perspectives validly.

 

Carlise, E. Fred. The Uncertain Self: Whitman's Drama
of Identity. East Lansing, Mich., 1973.

This study places Whitman's poems in the context
of an existential search for the self (by the poet).
Particularly referred to is Martin Buber (I and
Thou). Carlisle's study is one I hope mine is
complementery to; as Song of Myself is a search
for existential meaning it also searches for new
consciousness, I believe. Both are part of the
same search for understanding reality.

 

 

Chase, Richard. Walt Whitman. Minneapolis, 1961.

Chase's view that the poem is an attempt to
reconcile "democratic man" and the "integrity of
the self", is a suggestion of a central conflict
and struggle which has helped me to also see the
poem as a search. But Chase describes the conflict
differently and sees the two halves of it as con-
tradictory.

 

Feidelson, Charles Jr. Symbolism and American Literature.

Chicago, 1953.
The subtle treatment of the work "symbol" in

this book helps Feidelson describe nineteenth-
century American literature as it relates to modern
literature. And it helps him present Whitman's
poetry as words which constitute the pgt_of per-
ception for writer and reader, a perspective which
helped me see how Owen Barfield might be applied
to Whitman.

113

114

Matthiessen, F. O. The American Renaissance. New York,

Miller,

 

1941.

Matthiessen is particularly concerned to show
how the writers of the Romantic movement wrote and
thought in relationship to one another. He is
nearest my concerns in his suggestion that this
movement and our modern age have discovered the
value of myth and in his emphasis on Whitman's
faith in words.

James E. Jr. A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass.
Chicago, 1957.

Miller's sense of Song of Myself as an inverted
mystical experience is remote from my reading Of
that poem. But his idea that the poem dramatizes
a life of the imagination is very much in tune
with my view.

 

 

Walt Whitman, A Critical Anthology, ed. Francis Murphy.

 

Wasco ,

Baltimore, 1969.

Probably the fullest range of commentary on
Whitman in existence in one volume, includes brief
essays or statements by contemporaries of Whitman
and moderns, friend and foe. The book provided
me one of the better overviews of the studies that
have been done on Whitman and of Whitman himself.

Howard. Whitman Explorations in Form. Chicago,

 

1966.

Studies the language in Whitman's poetry to de-
termine rhetorical devices. This is more of a
formal look at rhetoric in Whitman than a study of
meaning in the words and so different from my ap-
proach. But it is a helpful specific look at the
poetry.

Whitman, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Roy Harvey

 

Pearce. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1962.

A variety of essays on Whitman's work, including
one of the finer defenses of Whitman's style by
Walter Sutton. Also an essay partly on Whitman's
technique by Roger Asselineau. Both helped me to
approach Whitman's poems technically.

Whitman's "Song Of Myself"--Origin, Growth, Meaning, ed.

James E. Miller Jr. New York, 1964.

Includes essays expressing a variety of perspec-
tives on Song of Myself. Randall Jarrell's com-
ments on that poem as poetry remind us it is worth
taking seriously. Roy Harvey Pearce, "'Song of
Myself' As Epic", suggests how exhilarating a poem
it can be.

 

115

T. S. Eliot

Drew, Elizabeth., T. S. Eliot, The Design of His Poetry.
New York, 1949.

Drew recognizes the subtlety of myth in earlier
societies, which places her in sympathy with
Barfield and Cassirer. She also places Eliot's
poetry in the context of Freud and Jung, and de-
scribes how Eliot's language penetrates below con-
scious levels of thought and feeling. I have
adopted this last view of hers and attempted to
show its relationship to a search for new conscious-
ness in Eliot's poetry.

Gardner, Helen. The Art_gf T. S. Eliot. London, 1949.

A study of the Four Quartets, which Gardner views
as containing solutions to the problems presented
in Eliot's earlier poetry and as Eliot's later
masterpiece. Gardner argues that in this poem
"the range of the instrument is greater than before"
(p. 2). While I do not discuss this in qualitative
terms, her study helped me see a reconciliation in
the Quartets between language and vision, or drama-

tized reaIit .

 

Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. New York,

1959.
Kenner's idea that the poet is invisible because

Of his language resists elucidation is along the
lines of what has become a usual distinction be-
tween Eliot the poet and the speakers in his
poems--the speakers do not see all that we, the
readers, see. His idea that there is a "functional
Obscurity" in The Waste Land is also the starting
point for my reading of that poem.

 

Matthiessen, F. O. Achievement of T. S. Eliot. New York,
1959.

One of the finest studies of Eliot, I believe.
Matthiessen suggests a focus helpful to me when he
says, "Eliot wants to suggest . . . the movement
of thought in a living mind" (p. 16).

 

Montgomery, Marion. An Essay on the American Magus.
Athens, Ga., 1970.
Montgomery suggests that between Eliot's earlier
poetry and the Quartets there was a change in
Eliot because the world was the same in both in-
stances, a position I think I agree with, though
I would add that for me The Waste Land and the
uartets both accomplish a similar understanding,
one Implicitly and one explicitly.

 

 

116

Musgrove, Sydney. T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman. New York,
1966. First published in 1952.

Musgrove considers this work to be mainly a
study of Eliot, and of Whitman's influence on
Eliot. Musgrove suggests that something of Whit-
man's use of language remained.imbedded in Eliot's
mind, though Eliot came to distrust Whitman's
vision. This work is of interest to me because it
focuses on the same two poets I do, but it accepts
Eliot's conclusion that his world is different
from Whitman's. I try to point out an important
similarity.

Schwarz, Daniel R. "The Failure of Meditation: The Unity
of Eliot's 'Gerontion'," T. S. Eliot, A Collec-
tion of Criticism, ed. Linda W. Wagner. New York,
1974.

Schwarz's interpretation of the poem is one I
accept and try to work with in order to place it
in the context of my study. Schwarz's central
idea, that the poem is a failure at meditation,
provides helpful language to me in my effort to
discuss the poem as part Of a profound search for
meaning.

 

Smith, Grover C. T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study

in Sources and Meaning. Chicago, 1956.
In a study of a large number of Eliot's works

Smith basically suggests the same context for them
I do, though he pursues his study in a very dif-
ferent way--for an overview of the works. However,
he recognizes that, "Eliot has considered the
problem of relating consciousness to externality"

(p. 25).

T. S. Eliot; A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Hugh

Kenner. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1962.

Most related to my study in this collection is
an excerpt from S. Musgrove's book T. S. Eliot and
Walt Whitman, in which he argues that Eliot learned
from but came to distrust Whitman--a statement I
agree with but which even Musgrove would not claim
as the whole truth. Also the famous essay in which
Donald DaVIe argues that since "The Dry Salvages"
part of the Four gpartets seems to imitate Whit-
man it.must be a satire; an argument I take excep-
tion to.

 

 

 

117

Language

Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. Grand Rapids,
Mich., 1967. Originally published in 1926.

A careful study of the history of meaning
through a focus on individual words and the devel-
opment of societies. Because of its extensive
working with changes in meaning this book may pro-
vide Barfield's most substantial case for his
theory about changing consciousness.

 

. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. New York,
1964. Originally published.in 1928.

This is probably the book by Barfield most es-
sential to my study, because Of its focus on the
language of poetry and.because of its exploring
of the relationship between language and mind,
and between consciousness and the imagination.

 

. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry.
London, 1957.

This short book provides an overview of Barfield's
ideas about the development Of human consciousness
and brief presentations of his evidence in art,
science, and language. In it Barfield also care-
fully retains a focus on the problem of modern
consciousness he wants his study applied to.

. Speaker's Meaning. Middletown, Conn., 1967.

Contains four essays on aspects of language de-
velopment and how it.re1ates to achieving a more
accurate sense of history. Barfield also acknow-
ledges a kinship he has with Ernst Cassirer, and
suggests that I. A. Richards seems to ascribe to
the theory that figurative language began as meta-
phor (a theory Barfield disagrees with).

 

. What Coleridge Thought. Middletown, Conn.,
1971.

Barfield's most recent book and, as the title
suggests, his fullest exposition of his slant on
Coleridge's ideas. Coleridge is a thinker Barfield
seems to admire as much as any in history, and so
this;book is also a fuller discussion of some key
ideas in the other books, Barfield's View of
Coleridge's concept of polarity for one.

 

Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on
Life, Literature, and Method. Berkely, 1966.

 

118

In his essays Burke particularly explores the
relationship between language and conception and
language and perception. His study Of how language
influences what we see I find to be very comple-
mentary to Barfield's study of the history of
meaning.

Cassirer, Ernest. Language and Myth, Trans. Susanne K.
'Langer. New York, 1946.

The fact that Cassirer's study and Barfield's
seemed to have been independent of one another,
and that both are extremely exacting in their
arguments, and that both find abundant evidence
for their similar positions powerfully substan-
tiates their perspective. Cassirer's presenta-
tion is by no means a duplicate of Barfield's.
Cassirer's focus on the relationship of myth and
reality offers similar conclusions to Barfield's,
but they are arrived at through a somewhat differ-
ent discussion of early religions.

 

. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Three:
The Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. Ralph
Manheim. New Haven, 1957. ,

In an introductory note Charles W. Hendel calls
this book "the central work of Cassirer's genius"
(p. ix) because it represents the study of know-
ledge and how knowledge is achieved at such a
fundamentally important level, and because it is
a maturing of Cassirer's thought. The book con-
siders "subjective" and "objective" analysis and
other issues important to my study.

 

Chomsky, Noam. Language and Mind. New York, 1968.
Chomsky approaches language in this volume in

order to find out how the study of language can
contribute to an understanding of human nature.
While Chomsky does not take his study in the di-
rection of Barfield and Cassirer but rather focuses
on the structure of modern English, he does also
conclude that modern ideas about language being
limited to the material and logical are in error,
a conclusion which supports Barfield's and
Cassirer's.

 

Fenollosa, Ernest. On the Chinese Written Character as a
Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound. San Francisco,
1936.
Fenollosa's study.of the physical or structural
suggestion in the Chinese written character suggests

 

119

a potential in language to communicate some of

the essential qualities of objects or experience.
His study supports much of Pound's discussion of

the potential for poetry, and it supports Barfield's
idea of the potential in language.

Hamilton, G. R. The Tell-Tale Article: A Critical Ap-
proach to Modern Poetry. London, 1949.

Hamilton argues that an increasing use of the
definite article in modern poetry is part of a
deadening of language.and vision. He also points
out the shortage.of verbs on Eliot's poetry, sug-
gesting that that also is a weakening of language.
This study highlights a point I try to pursue in
Eliot's and Whitman's poetry, though I do not share
Hamilton's fear that.E1iot's work represents a
decline in language.

 

Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art:
Developed from Philosophy in a New Key. New York,
1953.

Langer describes her sense of how Barfield and

Cassirer are related--asserting.they arrive at
similar conclusions, Barfield primarily through a
study of.poetry, and.Cassirer primarily through a
study of science. She suggests the need for art
to strive for the goals Barfield and Cassirer en-
visioned for consciousness.

 

Lewis, C. S. Studies in Words. Cambridge, England, 1960.
Lewis studies individual words and what he views
as their decline in meaning, his is a study in
tune with Barfield's in this approach, though
Lewis does not try to place.this work into the
realm of changing consciousness. He says he wants
to help people fully read Old books.

 

New Literary History (Fall, 1972).

This issue is devoted to trying to describe the
difference in language when it is put to different
uses, and devoted particularly to describing the
difference between literary and "normal" language.
Nearest.in spirit to my study, I think, is George
Steiner's essay, "Whorf, Chomsky and the student
of Literature," 15-34.

 

Smith, Logan Pearsall. Words and Idioms. Boston, 1925.
Smith's study is both charming and complementary
to Barfield's. Beginning with a focus on "English
Sea Terms" and what they suggests about the lives
of the people who use them, Smith moves on to

 

120

assert that the word "romantic" describes a way we
feel about an object, not the object itself (p.
82). Basically he argues that words may express
more or less of nature as they are used, and de-
pending on how we see words and nature.

Wheelwright, Philip. The Burning Fountain: A Study in

 

the Language of Symbolism.. Bloomington, 1968.
Wheelwright explores.the ways language limits
and conditions what we can.even study. In a very
real sense Wheelwright argues words refer to what

is, since they describe reality for us. In a
study of the meaning of the word symbol and of the
imagination he also implies a direction for modern
art.

 

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Philosophical Investigations,

 

trans. G. E. M. Anscomb. .Oxford, 1953.
Wittgenstein engages in.a large number of rela-
tively brief speculations.on-language, which in
general are in the direction of Barfield's ideas
about.language,.however,.and which present lines
of thought and examples which are helpful in think-
ing about language, and about Barfield. This
work also contains Wittgenstein's indictment of
the behavioral philosophy of education by pointing
out how.it is so mechanistic as to be useless,
"Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be
turned though nothing else moves with it, is not
part of the mechanism" (p. 95).

Other Sources

Blackmur, R. P. The Lion and the Honeycomb: Essays in

Brooks,

Solicitude and Critigue. New York, 1955.

Blackmur is concerned with what seems to be a
decline in our vital sense of words, and he de-
scribes a way of regaining contact with our world
and a certain kind of understanding through the
use of "analogy" which he means in more than a
mechanical or technical way; which he means to
some extent in the spirit of Barfield.

 

Cleanth. Modern Poetry and the Tradition. Chappel
Hill, N. C., 1939.

Brooks believes the modern tradition is in a
state of revolution the order of the "Romantic
Revolt" though he does not characterize this as

121

subtly as Barfield and Cassirer do, or perhaps
understand it in the same way. His reading of

The Waste Land helps establish the reading that
1rthe statement of beliefs emerges throu h confusion
and cynicism, not in spite of it," (p. 172), a
View which I believe relates to my particular slant
on that poem.

 

Cambon, Glauco.. The Inclusive Flame: Studies in American
Poetr . Bloomington, 1963.

A far.ranging study of American poetry that ex-
amines nineteenth-century poetry and more modern
poetry tracing a co-existing romantic or affirma-
tive impulse and a tragis impulse-~to which he
links Eliot and others. He is concerned with
language and subject in poetry and distinguishes
among a great number of poets, providing an out-
line history of their work.

 

Dekker, George. Sailing After Knowledge: The Cantos of

Ezra Pound. London, I963.
Pound's strategic and important relationship to

Eliot and his place as one the central poet-
thinkers of the modern age make certain studies
of his work relevant to my study. In this case
Dekker provides insight into The Cantos as a
search for inner.peace and as they relate to The
Waste Land.

 

 

Dembo, L. S. Hart Crane's Sanskrit Charge: A Study of
the Bridge.

Sees Crane's poetry as an attempt to rebuild a
world of mythical proportions in the face of the
modern way of seeing. And he describes Crane as
caught in the modern dilemma in which man "finds
himself alone and unimportant in the universe and
will not accept his fate" (p. 133).

Emerson, Ralph W. Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson,

ed. Stephen E. Whicher. Boston, 1957.
Emerson was, of course, very much concerned with

the way language and nature relate to one another.
His essays most directly related to the concerns
of my study are "The Poet" and "Nature". That
words have the ability to express more than the
surface of nature was one of his assertions.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essayy.
Princeton, 1957.
Most relevant to my study is the "Second Essay,
Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols," in which

122

Frye discusses how the writer ought to relate to
the natural reality of his world around him. Al-
though his sense of the relationship of words to
nature is not the same as Barfield's (Frye seems

to suggest that words can entirely create reality--
that man.absorbs nature,.whereas Barfield asserts
that man is not all), Frye's feeling that writers
should express as much of nature as they can, and
not merely its surface, does support Barfield.

Howard, Richard. Alone with.America; Essays on the Art
of Poetry in the United States since 1950. New
York, 1969.

Talks out of Howard's personal and critical re-

sponse to a very large number of modern poets,
and with some understanding of modern poetry as a
struggle.for connections in life beyond logic, a
perspective which makes it a study somewhat sym-
pathetic to Barfield's.

 

Kenner, Hugh. The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Norfolk, Conn.,
1951.

Intended as an introductory guide to The Cantos
especially. Its focus late in the book on Pound's
concepts of the "ideogram" and the "Vortex" raise
the subject of metaphor in Pound's poetry in an
important way, a way that points toward how Pound
might be discussed in light of Barfield.

 

 

Leavis, F. R., and Q. D. Leavis. Lectures in America.

London, 1969.
These lectures discuss in philosophical terms

and in regard to C. P. Snow the possibility that
"a general impoverishment of life" accompanies
the technological advance (p. 13). This provides
a look at society in somewhat the same terms I
offer in Chapter II of this study.

 

Meiners, Roger. Everything to be Endured; An Essay on
Robert Lowell and Modern Poetry. Columbia,
Missouri, 1970.

In describing the process of a Lowell poem and
the modern.context of Lowell's poetry Meiners
achieves both a personal (existential) understand-
ing and a Barfield—ian perspective that describes
the state of the modern poet in general. As a
devoted and careful student of Barfield's work,
Meiners' remarks both led me toward my study and
now, I hope, supports my work.

 

 

Miller,

123

"On Modern Poetry, Poetic Consciousness, and
the Madness of Poets," (in publication process,
bibliographical information.not available).

An essay which.describes the way in which modern
poetry struggles for new consciousness. Meiners'
traces a kind of imagery and other tendencies in
the poetry to establish it in the search Barfield
has suggested it is in,.and.Meiners also tries to
point to some directions we might take in our own
search.

J. Hillis. Poets of Reality; Six Twentieth-Century
Writers. Cambridge, Mass., 1965.

Miller suggests modern poetry is neither an ex-
tension of romanticism nor an expression of nihil-
ism but is involved in a journey beyond nihilism
toward "a poetry of reality" (p. 1). Miller seems
aware of the conflict caused by dualism in modern
society (and sees Eliot as a poet who expresses
the horrors of dualism), although his sense of how
language relates to this.and how we might move
beyond it is not so sharp.as.Barfield's. Miller
chooses to survey several modern writers as he
feels they relate to this conflict. Miller sees
romanticism as something that needs to be turned
away from. Barfield sees it as a source of ine
sight.

 

The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature,

ed. Richard Ellman and Charles Feidelson, Jr.
New York, 1965.

This book pursues, through introductory essays
of the editors and through a very large number of
excerpts from poets and novelists, the ways nine-
teenth and twentieth-century writers have viewed
the power of language and the relationship of
words to reality. This range provides a good
outline of how many writers have related to the
concerns of Barfield and Cassirer.

Olson, Charles. Projective Verse. New York, 1959.

 

This statement of Olson's may be one of the
best essay attempts to achieve the mental processes
of a poetry which fuses form, subject, language
and purpose through the imagination. The tran-
scending of logic and the simultaneity of the
processes are two of the keys, Olson suggests.
For me this helps describe a poetry somewhat like
Barfield believes is possible.

124

Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry.

Princeton, 1961.
Discusses a very large number of poets through

stages of the development of.American poetry.
He discusses how the poets refuse to accept their
culture's system of values, a fruitful perspective,
though he chooses breadth of coverage over depth
of exploration. The relationship of poets to
society's values is somewhat along the lines of
my study, though not an exactly like concern.

 

Ransom, John Crowe. Beating the Bushes: Selected Essays
l94l-l970. New York, 1972.

Particularly in his essay, "Wanted: An Onto-
logical Critic," Ransom tries to describe what he
feels are differences between the language of
poetry and the language of science (a distinction
which may be less valid as science discards its
connection with logic), and which also suggests
that poetry strives to recover the denser world
of our full perceptions, not.merely the world of
our logical understanding.

 

 

Richards, I. A. Coleridge on Imagination. Bloomington,
1960.

Richards' great admiration for Coleridge com-
bines with his own struggle to relate to Coleridge's
thought out of his "technical" and logical mind
creates a tension with Barfield's reading of
Coleridge. Richard's book.does not lose an argu-
ment, however, so much as the two views reflect on
one another.

 

. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judg-
ment. New York, 1929.

Richards' famous experiment with his students
in which he solicited responses from them about
poems without revealing the author to them, so
that he might use their comments to examine how
well "average” people could read poetry. Richards
uses their remarks as a springboard into a study
of the language and form of poetry.

. Principles of Literary Criticism. New York,
1928.

In this book Richards takes on a massive list
of critical concerns discussing what aesthetics is,
how it relates to other disciplines and to society.
He discusses "Art and Morals," "The Normality of
the Artist," and especially the uses of language
in poetry and other parts of life.

 

125

Riddell, Joseph.R. The Clairvoyante Eye: The Poetry and

Poetics of Wallace Stevens. Baton Rouge, 1965.
Riddell.puts StevensT poetry properly into the
context of a study of "the self-conscious man in
a time which . . . can find no adequate forms of
belief” (p. v). A subtle reading of Stevens in
this light, and since Stevens seems to me to be
in the top ranks of modern-poets in thought and
technique, an important comment on modern poetry.

Rosenthal, M. L. The Modern Poets; A Critical Introduction.

New York, 1960.

Strives to locate a large number of poets with-
in a certain context and so is limited both in how
deeply it can explore the context and the poets,
but the context is a worthy one and the study a
fruitful one, compatible with Barfield's, I be-
lieve. .Rosenthal says our.poetry seeks a vital
link with whatever in the past was "myth-making"
(p. 9).

Schneidau, Herbert N. Ezra Pound: The Image and the Real.

Baton Rouge, 1969.

Schneidau explores carefully and excitingly
Pound's devotion to the "luminous Detail" and the
faith it implies in the relationship of the partic-
ular to the universal.- Because it takes this
perspective and pursues.it subtly this provides an
important slant on modern poetry and a study com-
plementary to Barfield's.

Tate, Allen. Essays of Four Decades. Chicago, 1959.

Wagner,

Tate's essays cover a tremendous range of con-
cerns, but his perspective in addition to being
consistently imaginative steadily probes for an
understanding of the modern condition in which man
feels isolated from nature but unwilling to accept
that feeling as his full human conditions.

Linda W. The Poems of William Carlos Williams:

A Critical Study. Middletown, Conn., 1963.
Wagner's attention to Williams' "no ideas but

in things" theory and his high value for the

"local" in poetry helps me place Williams in the

search in modern poetry that Whitman, Eliot, Pound

and others were also engaged in. Williams' work

may not be as profound as Eliot's, but it is a

modern example of a poet trying to cope with dual-

ism.

 

126

Winters, Yvor. In Defense of Reason. New York, 1947.
Winters may provide a nearly unique slant on

modern poetry. .The title of his essay collection
can be taken fairly literally, as Winters seems
to equate logic with truth and.sanity. His view
is nevertheless very sophisticated and perhaps

a helpful contrast to Barfield as well as reward-
ing in its own right.

Witemeyer, Hugh. The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Berkely,

1968.
A study of Pound's early poetry (his pre-Cantos

poetry). For this reason it can serve to complete
a sense of Pound's thought and writing when read
with Kenner's and.Schneidau's work on Pound.
Pound's theory and execution in poetry is very
much in the same realm as Whitman's and Eliot's,
I believe.

 
   

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