The object of this study is to investigate T. S. Eliot in regard to that very elusive and omnipresent genre of literary history, the lyric. Eliot is a very good practitioner in lyric poetry and continually comments on the art of the lyric in his critical works. An examination of his finest lyric practice in the light of his theory on the subject will further illuminate the unity of Eliot as poet and critic, and quite possibly shed more light on the Four Quartets, whose core passages are self-contained lyrics of a very high caliber, each one emanating from a time-honored tradition yet each remarkably original. Truly these lyrics embody the double quality Eliot praises in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in 1919: " … we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet's] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." Nowhere is Eliot more original than in these lyrics, and nowhere are the voices of the lyric tradition more clearly heard in his work. (p. 4)

As a lyric practitioner T. S. Eliot developed to a considerable degree toward clarity. His early lyrics, for example, do not exemplify so well or so consistently those qualities peculiarly necessary for lyric verse which characterize the later works. The obscure characters and the difficult syntax endemic to Eliot through the 1920s are inimical to the sort of clarity demanded of lyric verse. The later poetry, however, presents its own problems to readers who are insensible to the religious nature of its content. The problem of communication, whether due to obscurity in manner and content or to reader incapacity, remains a factor throughout Eliot's poetic career and may not be skirted. (p. 10)

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" itself, in spite of its title, is a dramatic monologue rather than a song proper. Yet the title sets up no false expectation. While the monologue is certainly ironic, the touches of lyric grace throughout operate functionally to betray the romantic aspirations of the speaker and lend a whimsy and pathos to his abortive proposals. If J. Alfred Prufrock's aspirations are romantic, his view of himself as reflected from the world in which he moves is clinically hard, fixing him in a "formulated phrase." This contrast is the marrow of the poem, and the juxtaposition of lyricism with the tone of satire is the perfect vehicle for such tension. The musical features of "Prufrock" are obvious. The incantatory tone, the use of refrain and anaphora, are all evidence of an affinity with song indicated by the title. The title is not imposed as a joke. The music of the monologue bears it out, thus sustaining the irony while making it more subtle.

The outstanding feature of the music of "Prufrock" is the use of rime, profuse and haphazard, yet melodic. In no way, however, is it merely a decoration. Eliot's cadences are peppered with the ironic touch of rimed satire, especially notable in his coupling by rime words that, together, form a kind of absurdity. Thus the rime constitutes an implicit commentary on a ridiculous situation of the protagonist. Fittingly this satiric use of rime increases as the poem progresses and the speaker's view of his predicament becomes more clear. In the ninth verse paragraph satiric intent completely dominates the rime pattern. The stanza is punctuated by the middle and end rime "prayed-afraid." All the rest consist of such bits of levity as "ices-crisis," "platter-matter," "flicker-snicker," providing deflation by association, and thus showing Prufrock's pretensions in the merciless light of self-knowledge…. The satiric use of rime in "Prufrock" is not divorced, however, from the more lyrical cadences dominating the poem. The difference is one of functional necessity, given the content and character of this particular monologue. Eliot uses his lyrical elements skillfully and with real decorum, lending a complicating dimension to a satiric portrait.

This is one use of lyricism in the early Eliot: to heigh ten the emotional tone of a nonlyric poem. It shows again in "Portrait of a Lady," not a lyric poem, yet enhanced by qualities belonging to a musical tradition. The use of rime and refrain, the progression of images through seasonal and diurnal change—all these features enhance the portrait, giving it emotional nuances not possible to attain without them. A line from the conclusion of the poem itself, though ironic, describes the melodic effect quite well: "This music is successful with a 'dying fall.'" The music preserves the tone of sophistication while carving out a delicacy of emotional detail needed to convey the uncertainty of feeling and thought in the protagonist. (pp. 13-14)

Just as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" dominates the 1917 volume, and "Gerontion" the 1920 collection, the dream lyric "Eyes that last I saw in tears" leads the Minor Poems with a rare and penetrating use of lyricism…. In technique the poem illustrates an accomplished rendering of the best principles of lyric verse. Even more important is the fact that the poem has never been fully explicated, and the subject matter is crucial in tracing the direction Eliot was to take in his selection of material for his lyric poetry. He moves more and more into a preoccupation with human response as the basis of human beatitude. "Eyes that last I saw in tears" deals with this material powerfully and provocatively with intense lyric grace. (p. 26)

One sees in Eliot's work a continual flow of lyric verse broker only in the 1920 collection of witty satiric verse, a volume that seems an aberration from his natural base in serious emotional content. The highlights are scattered throughout the period stretching from 1911 to 1935 and are impressive. The more successful the lyric, the greater its clarity. None of his poems is easy, and each poses special problems within lyric categorization. The "Preludes" are too objective; "La Figlia che Piange" is distanced from its emotional subject by the rhetorical structure. While the Ariel Poems are dramatic monologues of a high order, and "Marina" in particular is intense in emotion and powerful in melody, yet the form itself poses a problem. The "Landscapes" of the mid-thirties are noticeably different from the "Preludes" written in 1915 as far as lyric method is concerned. The speaker is much more moved by the scene, and communicates the emotional effect of the landscapes by a perfect command of music.

It seems that, as Eliot grew in maturity as a poetic practitioner, he allowed more emotional expression and found the right, the precise way to commit that expression to words. Surely the intensity and control are splendid in "Eyes that last I saw in tears," written in 1924. Eliot's astute use of allusion is a marvel of economy in the conveyance of direct emotion and the wider human significance of the incident portrayed. At this period Eliot relies on a Virgilian twilight atmosphere for good reason. What he deals with is the mystery of encounter, the mystery of the transforming impact of other on the self. "Ash Wednesday" and "Marina" treat of the encounter accepted and responded to; "Eyes that last I saw in tears" records the attitude of one who had made the great refusal, and knows what has been and what is to follow from that action. Such things are mysteries and cannot be formulated with ease. One must grope for the proper expression, and Eliot is confronted with a Protean wrestle with words in trying to convey what he perceives in those mysteries. The effect is at once powerful and nebulous. One is affected by the music before he totally perceives the meaning. The meaning dawns gradually and never in isolation from the music. One perceives how the sound embodies the sense; it is the flesh and bones of the meaning structure. The method weaves an unmistakable aura of mystery which, in these poems, is very much to the purpose. (pp. 29-30)

Though the shorter poem is more amenable to the demands of the lyric tradition, we see lyric qualities operating in the longer works. The muted music of "The Hollow Men" marks the poem with unmistakable lyricism. The Waste Land depends on lyrical qualities to give full impact to such scenes as the hyacinth garden, Elizabeth and Leicester in the barge, the Thames-daughters, "Death by Water," Gethsemane and Calvary at the opening of the last section…. The point is that in all these cases a definite correspondence exists between Eliot's desire to convey intense emotional experience and his use of lyricism in the poems. But his employment of the techniques of lyricism here is markedly different from that in Four Quartets. In his earlier long poems Eliot employs lyric material as interludes and intensifiers of the various ideas under consideration. In "Ash Wednesday" the entire idea eludes rational expression, and the whole fabric of the poem is lyrical. Thus, as Eliot progresses from The Waste Land to "Ash Wednesday," his lyricism becomes more pervasive and more varied in function from poem to poem. In all three cases, moreover, it differs from the lyricism that will emerge in Four Quartets.

From the lyrical opening of The Waste Land to the closing refrain, Eliot uses structural and verbal music to heighten a sense of emotional awareness. From time to time memory and desire encroach upon a world peopled by the spiritually dead. These intrusions are always lyrical in tone, but are not distillations of the scenes or passages at hand. Rather they are in opposition and stand out from the context, thus forming a tension between real life and the kind of nonlife which Eliot scrutinizes. (pp. 31-2)

Throughout The Waste Land the spiritually dead are prodded by moments of memory of a better life and desire for a better life. These hints and guesses are conveyed by means of lyrical techniques in a milieu of narration, dramatization, and exposition. It is a swift and efficient way to provide a norm against which to judge the quality of life depicted in the poem.

Eliot uses a different method entirely in "The Hollow Men." This is not surprising, for it is a very different poem from The Waste Land. Lyricism seems to take over completely as the hollow men virtually sing their way through all five movements. But the music here does not set up a contrast with the spiritual state of the speakers. Instead it embodies that state. It functions as a protective screen softening the speakers' perception of reality. The quiet music mesmerizes the sensibility. Here we have music as anodyne. (p. 43)

There is no doubt about the hollow men. They are lost and hopeless. This poem is rock bottom in the Eliot scale. With the publication of "Ash Wednesday" we perceive a "struggle beyond hope and despair" as the protagonist mounts the saint's stair of purgation, relying all the while on the mysterious intercessory figure who has the power to make strong the fountains and make fresh the springs.

In "Ash Wednesday," as in The Waste Land, Eliot employs lyricism as an intensifier of reality and emotional awareness. As in "The Hollow Men," the lyricism is pervasive. Through the lyrical qualities of the verse Eliot conveys a sense of transcendent experience perceived as reality but not quite understood. In this respect the lyric quality of "Ash Wednesday" bears affinity to that used in Four Quartets, but structurally the usage is quite different in the two poems. In "Ash Wednesday" the lyric qualities spill over into the entire substance. There is no concentration of the material into a separate lyric that embodies the entire subject of the poem.

"Ash Wednesday" and the Ariel Poems, all published between 1927 and 1930, are Eliot's first outright religious poetry, and these poems reveal a theological position far removed from midwestern Unitarianism and New England Puritanism, the two forces that comprised Eliot's religious formation. The theology is that of Dante and John of the Cross. We have seen that Eliot as critic and as artist is one man. There is a continual correspondence evident in his work so that his poetry exemplifies his constantly reiterated opinions…. (p. 45)

The music of "Ash Wednesday" is delicate and insistent, communicating the mystery and peace of the speaker in the purgatorial state. It is the right medium for conveying the poet's experience at this time. Speaking of Dante, Eliot says "that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."… He notes in Dante "a poetic as distinguished from an intellectual lucidity."… Although Eliot is writing in his native tongue, he is speaking from a spiritual state whose language is tantamount to a foreign tongue for the large part of his audience. It is the language of mysticism with a long history, which the Anglo-Catholic Eliot has inherited as spiritual legacy through Rome. The language is unfamiliar to the modern reader and makes demands. Yet the music is immediately apprehensible though the meaning is at first elusive.

The poem is predominantly in delicate falling rhythm, further emphasized by the many feminine rimes. Rime spills over from end rime to internal and even to the merely visual ("dolour-colour"). Eliot seems careless about the patterning of sound. The sound-structure gets its total effect by its pervasiveness. The lyricism, however, has a powerful concentration in two outstanding devices: the liturgical refrains which signal the direction the speaker is taking, so that the whole of "Ash Wednesday" reveals itself as a spiritual journey; and the fine distillation of the paradox of purgation in the Irish litany section of part 2. (pp. 48-9)

Eliot's use of sources in "Ash Wednesday" is amazing. His lyrical use of the ancient Christian liturgy gives shape and direction to what appears to be a dreamy meditation. The Dantesque material is couched in careful metrical and grammatical paradigms to telescope and encapsule the whole last sequence of the Purgatorio.

The problem is that one needs to be familiar with the Christian liturgy, the aesthetics of which embody its own meaning. Otherwise one cannot get the full richness of Eliot's method of allusion, or even more than the bare bones of what he is saying in "Ash Wednesday." This is a decided drawback, and Eliot's audience is limited by it. (p. 55)

To state this problem of obscurity is not to devalue Eliot's craftsmanlike use of his sources. The reason for his obscurity is a lack of common coin between the religious poet and many modern readers. Actually it would be hard to find more useful and felicitous tools than those Eliot employs in this poem for shaping what could otherwise be vague and amorphous experience. It is organic form at its most original. To place the highly personal state of religious conversion in a universal frame, Eliot uses the best of a tradition. To Eliot it would be the most human way to approach the task: "Man is man because he can recognize supernatural realities, not because he can invent them."

In his long poems Eliot uses lyric matter to intensify, contrast, enrich by allusion, give shape to difficult subject matter. For different reasons some of the poetry remains obscure. In all cases the lyricism itself helps elucidate. This is true even of "Ash Wednesday," given knowledge of his sources on the part of the reader. As he progresses from The Waste Land to "Ash Wednesday," he relies more and more on lyricism to convey emotion. But nowhere do we find a precedent for the particular function of the lyrics in Four Quartets. (p. 56)

[Eliot very definitely bothered] about the communication of meaning in Four Quartets, which he [considered] his best work, one on which his reputation would stand or fall.

The successful combination of difficult subject matter and simplicity of exposition is certainly the fruit of experience. Murder in the Cathedral surely helped, and Eliot has noted the lesson of clarity which writing for the stage teaches a poet. But it is also a continued attention to the lyric in criticism and in practice that accounts for the enormous success of the fourth-section lyrics in Four Quartets. (p. 57)

The lyrics of Four Quartets are marked by similarity as well as difference. In each there is a notable discipline of rhythm more or less relaxed or taut as the demands of the meaning structure dictate. Rhythm thus moves in a wide arc between the incantatory and the prosaic. No matter how closely the meter approaches the measured discipline of musical regularity, it never moves away from the ambient of the common idiom of spoken language. The same principle informs Eliot's style. His diction, for example, is never a liberation from common speech but a continual departure from and approximation of the spoken idiom. The demands of good prose act as a fulcrum for Eliot's poetic practice. He exploits grammatical structure for purposes of cadence, but the music produced is always an echo or implementation of the thought pattern. In Eliot's criticism fitness is invariably the norm for evaluation: fitness of parts to the whole structure, and fitness of techniques to meanings. He has followed his own principle so closely that it is difficult to determine in his practice whether the meaning inheres in the structure, or whether the structure mirrors the meaning. (p. 58)

Eliot has used his technical apparatus to underscore the meaning. The two are so well integrated that "something results in which medium and material, form and content, are indistinguishable." They "are interesting as one thing, not as two." This kind of fusion is another desideratum to which Eliot as critic returns continually and consistently. (p. 60)

[One can see in the fourth-section poems of Four Quartets, "Little Gidding," "East Coker," "Burnt Norton," and "The Dry Salvages"] adherence to a lyric tradition of measured verse transmuting thoughts and sentiments into concrete language. In Eliot's particular manipulation of this tradition there is continual departure from "worn-out poetical fashion." The total effect is one of genuine originality coupled with heavy reminiscences of the past. The tradition is there, but so is the freshness of something new. As Eliot remarks of Pound, so one could say of Eliot himself: "His versification is a logical development of the verse of his English predecessors." Each of the poems is characterized by a more or less tight metrical discipline, the degree of this discipline depending on its fitness to the subject. The prosodic pattern, both in line weight and cadence type, is equally suited to the meaning structure. The poet's choice of diction and syntax seems to fuse with his order of thought, which is carried by a system of carefully worked imagery. The fourth-section lyrics are well-made poems "where every word is at home, / Taking its place to support the others." In short, the lyric variety so noticeable among the four selections can be attributed to the exigencies of handling the different subject matter of each. (p. 81)

While the language of a poem must conform for better or worse to the speech patterns of contemporary usage, so must the structure of a poem be a fidelity to the thought and feeling expressed therein. "As this fidelity induces variety of thought and feeling, so it induces variety of music." For all his caution concerning musical analogy, remarks on the musical qualities of verse are ubiquitous in Eliot, and they are of a piece. Most of his theory on this matter is recapitulated in his 1942 lecture "The Music of Poetry." He insists that the "musical poem is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of the words which compose it, and … these two patterns are indissoluble and one." Sound to Eliot is just "as much an abstraction from the poem as is the sense."… He speaks of the music of a word and says it is "at a point of intersection": its music concerns the connotative definition, its associations, its allusiveness; its music inheres in the word's relation to structure…. Certainly it is this type of music Eliot consciously employs in the diction of the Four Quartets lyrics, just as it is a "very complex musical structure" of imagery which he plies in each of these poems. He reminds us "that the music of verse is not a line-by-line matter, but a question of the whole poem."… Always there is this insistence on relation of the element to the whole. It is no wonder, then, that Eliot believes the properties of music which concern the poet most nearly are "the sense of rhythm and the sense of structure."… Both of these are concerned with the whole fabric, the relation of part to whole and whole to part.

Eliot's practice in making these lyrics is in keeping with principles constantly reiterated in his scattered critical essays. It seems quite reasonable to apply to his literary work, both poetry and prose, what he said of Ezra Pound: "… of no other poet can it be more important to say, that his criticism and his poetry, his precept and his practice, compose a single oeuvre. It is necessary to read [Eliot's] poetry to understand his criticism, and to read his criticism to understand his poetry." (pp. 82-3)

Eliot's theological view in Four Quartets is one deeply felt and difficult to commit to words. The fact that three of his fifth sections are concerned with the problem of words is an indication of how much store he set by the seriousness of the difficulties involved in communication. He is attempting to communicate in language his perception of life in the dimensions of past, present, and future; the significance of history to the individual; and the leavening power of the individual on the process of history. What Eliot had seen as the significance of the individual talent to the whole body of tradition …, he now probes in regard to man in time and space, man in the history of mankind and in salvation history. (p. 85)

Each of the fourth section lyrics distills the essence of the quartet in which it occurs. Lifted out and juxtaposed, the lyrics form a sequence in which is embodied the essential progression of ideas for the entire four. "Time and the bell" presents us with insights not quite understood, hints and guesses not quite apprehended, but truly part of experience and pointing to an end outside themselves. Such experience leads the poet to meditate on its possible meaning. "The wounded surgeon" lyric shapes this insight into an overtly Christian meditation on the Passion of Christ and man's incorporation into that redemptive act through participation in the Eucharist. The Marian lyric of "The Dry Salvages" is cast in the form of a prayer at the time of one's personal annunciation. In view of the significance of the Virgin in Dante and in Christian tradition, the lyric of the third quartet is a definite move toward the incorporation hinted by the kingfisher's wing in "Burnt Norton" and pondered in the eucharistic meditation of "East Coker." To petition the Virgin of the Annunciation is to pray that the Incarnation be made efficacious in one's own life.

It is worthwhile considering here the traditional prayer which ends the angelus:

Pour forth, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy grace into our hearts; that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ, thy son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by his passion and cross be brought to the glory of his resurrection, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (Roman Missal)

This is the thrust of the entire Four Quartets. The final direction for the attainment of such a goal is presented in the pentecostal lyric of "Little Gidding." The preceding lyrics show increasing insight into the human condition and the need "For a further union, a deeper communion" with others and with God. Part 4 of "Little Gidding" directs one to the alternatives of damnation or beatitude through purgation of whatever constitutes a barrier to union. The choice is stark and the lyric is simple and profound. Beatitude is communal; community is costly. Acceptance of a radical purgation of selfishness and indifference leads to attainment of the beatitude of union; for purgation is prompted by love, "the unfamiliar Name" behind the suffering involved in such a purification. The fire and the rose are perceived as one through "the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling." (pp. 94-5)

Restoring to poetry the stuff of theology is a formidable accomplishment, but Eliot has also restored the stuff of lyricism to philosophical poetry, thus imbuing it with a disciplined precision as well as an emotional intensity. From beginning to end Eliot employs techniques of lyricism to convey his most profound philosophical and theological insights. As he develops from an ethical poet to a religious poet, Eliot's religious sensibility becomes more and more refined, and the vehicle of its expression, his poetry, more and more accomplished in lyrical skill. In the process of finding the right mode of expression for his religious evolution, Eliot has effected some of the most original uses of the oldest poetic genre, the lyric.

In a century when poetry has become highly cerebral, and the sound-structures which convey the meaning of that poetry consequently more complex, it is significant that one of the most overtly intellectual poets of the age would turn to the most uncerebral form in literary history to find body for his ideas. Perhaps it is the only way. Indeed, it would seem so, for the result is a perfect coalition of form and meaning. (pp. 99-100)

Ann P. Brady, in her Lyricism in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot (copyright © 1978 by Kennikat Press Corp.; reprinted by permission of Kennikat Press Corp.), Kennikat, 1978, 120 p.