Eliot Between Blake and Yeats

Abstract

Most people recognise that however genuine was Eliot’s admiration for many aspects of Blake’s work, this is probably outweighed by the powerful and trenchantly expressed reservations. In this connection, almost as interesting as what Eliot has to say about Blake is the fact that he chose to say it and then to give his thoughts further prominence in The Sacred Wood (1920) alongside such innovative theoretical essays as ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ or ‘Hamlet and his Problems’. Like all Eliot’s critical work in this period (these essays were written between 1917 and 1920), this piece has a strategic aspect. Eliot, with studied disingenuousness, dismisses the idea that Blake is merely ‘a wild pet for the supercultivated’, thereby recognising part of the threat posed by Blake’s influence while suggesting one way in which he is going to deflect it (not at all dishonestly, of course).1 What is good about Blake is going to be shown to derive from his hospitality to ‘the impersonality of the artistic process’ — that famous and highly significant phrase from ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. At first it might not seem as if this were really the case, for Eliot’s first piece of concessive praise is formed from the idea of Blake’s ‘peculiar honesty’ which is ‘peculiarly terrifying’ (SW, 151). One might be tempted to interpret this concession as going all the way in incorporating Eliot among those who look to poetry for the expression of truth and sincerity.