In
The Social Function of Poetry Eliot
tried to negotiate the contradictions. There is an obvious tension in the essay
between what he tries to claim for poetry and what his intelligence tells him
is the way the world works. Part of this tension may be created by the context of this talk.
He began with a note of caution that
could easily have served as an
epitaph for every attempt to discuss either “the function of poetry” or “the
role of the poet”:
When we speak of the ‘function’ of
anything we are likely to be thinking of what that thing ought to do rather
than what it does do or has done. That is an important distinction because I do
not intend to talk about what I think poetry ought to do. People who tell us
what poetry ought to do, especially if they are poets themselves, usually
have in mind the particular kind of poetry they
would like to write. (SFP p3)
But
his history is no better than Pound’s or Shelley’s (this surprised me):
A superior language can seldom be
exterminated except by the extermination of the people who speak it. When one
language supersedes another it is usually because that language has advantages
that commend it, and which offer not merely a difference but a wider and more
refined range, not only for thinking and feeling, than the more primitive
language”(SFP, 8)
Linguistically,
Eliot’s statement date him as badly as Shelley’s do. “There are, however, several widely held misconceptions
about Language…The most important of these is the idea that there are such
things as primitive languages-languages
with a simple grammar, a few
sounds, and a vocabulary of only a few hundred words, whose speakers have to
compensate for their language’s deficiencies
through gestures” (Crystal
2006).
Eliot
ironically echoes those scholars who once dismissed English as a language incapable of precision.
He
also seems to be willfully ignoring
the historical fact that “advantages’ were often political rather than
linguistic. Old English did not disappear because Anglo-Norman had a wider and
more refined range, but because the English Aristocracy was all but eradicated
in three battles in 1066 and from the end of the 11th Century to the
middle of the 14th Century French was the privileged language, the kings of England did not speak
English, and anyone who wanted to deal with either the law or the
administration had to learn French or Latin. Irish and Welsh almost disappeared as native languages not
because they were inadequate but because the people in power banned them and refused to
communicate in those languages.
Eliot
does try to address the obvious contraction: how does original poetry, making
demands on its small but elite readership, affect the health of the culture?
His answer is confused ( I find it very difficult to write that about
T.S.Eliot). It could only work in a “homogenous culture” where the elite
readership of the best modern poetry are in fact the cultural elite, the people
who matter. Others will want to follow their example, so there will be an inevitable trickle
down effect which will eventually spread the influence of poetry throughout
society. Gioia states the same argument.
Both writers ignore the fact that modern culture is not homogenous (even
the England of Eliot in the 1940s wasn’t). Neither reading nor writing poetry in English has
guaranteed membership of a
cultural elite, apart from the self appointed ones we’ve been studying. Sidney
belonged to a cultural elite who others copied because he was born into the
aristocracy and connected to some of the wealthiest families in the
country. His birth guaranteed his
social status: his status validated his poems. Not the other way round. Sir Ernest Gower’s 'Plain
words" and I A Richard’s “Practical Criticism” in their own ways underline
the limitations of the linguistic
skills of the “cultural elite”.
Eliot,
like Pound, and Shelley, and Gioia and other s after him, confused cause and symptom and
fell victim to his own muddled metaphor. (I find that really hard to write
about the first two as well) Language is not an organic plant that flowers if
fertilised with great poetry and withers if forced to survive on a diet of
..whichever poet you think is not great. Even if it were possible to define what is good and bad
poetry against an objective standard, and avoid the inherent moralizing, it is difficult to believe any culture
died because of bad poetry or any language disappeared for Eliot’s
reasons.
A language disappears
because the people who speak it
die out, and according to modern linguists, of the world’s 6,000 or so languages perhaps half will die out in the
present century (Crystal 2008 p 336). The disappearance of cultured literary
productions may be one symptom of a
society more concerned with survival. As Stead also observed, it is impossible
to imagine how poetry improves the health of a nation. If Eliot and Pound were right,
then given their strictures about the state of English poetry, England should have lost the First
world war.
Anyone
trying to make this argument is guilty of confusing symptoms with causes and in
Rosemary Waldrop’s words acting “
as if there existed nothing but society on the one hand and writing on the other” (Bernstein 1990). Eliot acknowledges this
and then ignores the implications, presumably because they would invalidate the
claims he is making. Waldrop succinctly points out the obvious objection: The two decades before Hitler came to power
were a period of incredible literary flowering, upheaval, exploration in
Germany. All the dadaists and expressionists had been questioning, challenging,
exploring changing the language, limbering up its joints. So the German language should have
been in very good condition, yet the Nazis had no trouble putting it to work
for their purposes, perverting it to where what was said was light years from
what was meant. So while language thinks for us, there is no guarantee that it
will be in a direction we like. (In Bertstein p47)
This destructive wander through the
Defences was one way of stripping away the accumulated waffle to see what, if
anything is left. I think there’s a great deal, but it doesn’t rely on silly
claims for what an abstraction called ‘Poetry’ obviously doesn’t or can’t do now, and never has
done in the past.
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