‘Preludes’ as Prelude: In Defence of Eliot as Symboliste

Abstract

Since Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era it has seemed that the only reason for dealing with Eliot’s concern for Symboliste poetry is to facilitate negative contrasts to Pound and to Williams Kenner concedes Symbolisme the honour of having introduced a ‘scientific Romanticism’ enabling poetry to rely on the expressive force of language without having to rely on mythological and argumentative supports. But his version of it exacts the enormous price of demanding that the poet look no further than the words. So while the Symboliste Eliot withdraws into the role of impersonal catalyst mixing a complex but ungroundable set of connotative resonances (beyond which ‘there is frequently nothing to restore’), Pound increasingly concentrates on a very different kind of construction devoted above all to a ‘clean perception [that] sets realities before the mind’.¹ Unwilling to challenge either Kenner or the awesome ideological force of terms like ‘realities’, Eliot criticism has turned elsewhere for less contaminated existential frameworks which might dignify the poetry by allowing it to make substantial claims on our experience. Thus we find critics taking very seriously the religious values that seem to have occupied Eliot throughout his career, turning to the ways in which the poetry expresses and tries to resolve a complex personal psychology, or even finding in Eliot’s engagement with history a set of imaginative strategies remarkably relevant for poststructural theory.