“meaning.” This method pioneered by Stein comprises one type of
Modernist “difficulty” and has been widely imitated in recent decades
by so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets.
Another source of Modernist difficulty can be found in Eliot’s essay,
where the poet enunciates his famous dictum:We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it
exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great vari-
ety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined
sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must
become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in
order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into meaning.We will hardly quibble with Eliot’s comments on “complexity.” But when
he says that to create this complexity the poet has to “dislocate... lan-
guage into meaning,” we may remain skeptical since he is advising poets
to break the linguistic, formal, and generic rules that make complexity
possible. With his further suggestions that the modern poet must possess
“a refined sensibility” and that poetry should be “more allusive” and
“indirect,” Eliot is effectively saying that modern poets should write in
a private code. This attitude is characteristic of Modernist writers, who
felt they comprised a cultural elite. Much of their work was designed
to chasten—and perhaps forever elude—a bourgeoisie addicted to popu-
lar art.
Information Theory, which was born partly out of wartime efforts to
interpret secret military codes, provides insights into Eliot’s strategy
since the difference between traditional and Modernist poetry is analo-
gous to that between peacetime radio broadcasts aimed at a popular
audience and coded military messages aimed at a highly select one. A
popular radio broadcast, according to Campbell, uses a code that makes
it easy to separate the message from noise and distortion. A secret mili-
tary broadcast, on the other hand, must add a key onto its coded message
“rather in the same fashion as noise is added onto the message in ordi-
nary communications.” In order to decipher such a coded military com-
munication, Campbell adds, “one must separate the key from the
message, and the idea is to design a code which makes that a very diffi-
cult task for the enemy to accomplish.”
In his masterpiece, The Waste Land, Eliot not only dislocates narra-
tive to make it difficult to decipher by those of insufficiently refined
sensibilities, he also uses indirection and allusiveness to provide the key
to his secret code. The key, of course, is the “mythical method” defined162 Paul Lake