Log24

From T. S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination
by Sarah Kennedy,
Cambridge University Press, 2018 —

Chapter 7
His Dark Materials

Would you have me
False to my nature? Rather say, I play
The Man I am.

– Shakespeare, Coriolanus, III.ii. [Link added.]

. . . .

Eliot describes the creative germ as the
‘unknown, dark psychic material . . .
with which the poet struggles’.

The phrase echoes Milton’s Paradise Lost :

Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixt
Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds . . .

Eliot’s creative logic retains an aspect of the divine
poet-as-maker, but the effect is not hubristic.
Where Milton’s Almighty may ordain, Eliot’s poet
can only struggle against something unknown.
Yet even in the image of struggle, reminiscent of
Jacob’s struggle with the obscured figure who
appears in the darkness and departs at dawn,
there is a sense of the poet as more than human,
both blessed and maimed by the confrontation.
Like Milton, Eliot locates the struggle in a ‘wilde abyss’:
he once described human consciousness
(following The Tempest ) as extending into a
‘dark . . . backward and abysm of time’. Importantly,
this space is not an aspect of the world as constructed
by a presiding intention (as in Paradise Lost ), but exists
within the poet.
. . . .