Modern American Poetry

(^258) Edward Hirsch
of the comprehensive “mind of Europe,” placed American poetry firmly in a
European context and tradition. (In 1933, Pound concurred that “Eliot and
I are in agreement or ‘belong to the same school of critics,’ in so far as we
both believe that existing works form a complete order which is changed by
the introduction of the ‘really new’ work.”)^13 As a corollary to his emphasis
on the interrelationship between the individual poet and the preceding
tradition, the avant-garde artist and the deep (as opposed to the recent) past,
Eliot also argued for the depersonalization of poetry in his well-known
formulation, “The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a
continual extinction of personality.” The essays in Eliot’s first critical book,
The Sacred Wood(1920), emphasize traditionalism, impersonality, and a
transcendental European authority. They ask the critic to focus on the poem
itself rather than on the personality or emotions of the poet; they call for
“analysis and comparison” in considering the poem as an object. Although
Eliot himself never practiced the method of close analysis and systematic
criticism that would derive from the work of I.A. Richards (Practical Criticism,
1926) and William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity,1928), his focus on the
work of art as an ontological object is the inaugural step in a critical method
that would become formulated as New Criticism during the thirties.^14
In the July 1932 issue of the Criterion,Pound looked back to the
moment when he and Eliot decided that free verse had to be replaced by
regular forms:
That is to say, at a particular date in a particular room, two
authors, neither engaged in picking the other’s pocket, decided
that the dilution of vers libre,Amygism, Lee Masterism, general
floppiness had gone too far and that some counter-current
needed to be set going ... Remedy prescribed “Émaux et Camées”
(or the Bay State Hymn Book). Rhyme and regular strophes.
Results: Poems in Mr. Eliots secondvolume not contained in
his first (Prufrock, Egoist,1917), also “H.S. Mauberley”^15
There are twelve new poems in Eliot’s second volume, Poems(1920).
Eliot wrote four of the poems in French under the influence of Corbière to
get himself unlocked from a stagnant period, seven in quatrains derived from
Gautier (though the ironic diction harks back to Laforgue and the violent wit
is reminscent of Donne). The quatrains are allusive, chilly, condensed, witty.
Their rigid structure emphasizes coherence and control, an idea of imposed
order. George Williamson calls the quatrains “a temporary discipline rather
than a lasting form,” and, tellingly, the book’s most important single poem,