Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt

Abstract

The article examines nature of Eliot's lyricism, having suggested that all lyricism is expression of desire, a reaching out for an unattainable fulfilment. It takes note of fact that although Eliot has written lyric lines of incomparable beauty, he did not produce a body of lyric poems. His lyricism seems to break out, as though stifled, rather than to constitute raison d'etre of his work. The article relates this to belief expressed by Eliot in Tradition and Individual Talent that poet escapes from rather than expresses his own personality, which, in turn, would seem to reflect two ideas of Bradley: being that all reality is and all one, and second that is of three orders, immediate, relational, and transcendent. Although much of Eliot's poetry reflects relational experience, a nostalgia for immediacy of experience permeates Eliot's work. If we examine his lyric imagery, we find reference almost always to his early life, to a past that he has left behind. The poet's first world creates his rose garden, to which he turns and returns. It was only during his last years with his marriage to Valerie, that his abiding loneliness, his hunger for lost simplicity of his early life, was seemingly assuaged by a happiness akin to that immediate The effect upon his verse was of dubious merit. ********** Many years ago, while teaching a course on Eliot, I had students read Keats' On First Looking into Chapman's Homer and then write an essay entitled On looking into Eliot's The Waste Land. Recently, teaching course again, I had occasion to revisit Eliot. I came to see that constituted for me his poetry's appeal was nostalgia to which it gave voice for an entire generation to which I belong. When all issues and allusions of The Waste Land which so preoccupy reader were all but forgotten, it was its lyricism which remained with us and echoed in our minds expressing, like all great poetry, what cannot be expressed. Perhaps all lyricism is expression of desire, a reaching out for an unattainable fulfillment, addressed for most part to someone who would seem to possess promise or at least possibility of restoring soul to fulness of being. The lyric has been defined by Mill as the utterance that is overheard, by Joyce as a cri de coeur; it has been spoken of as silent soliloquy revealing landscape of mind. However defined, recognition of its essential quality persists, which is need of poet to speak from his solitude. That Eliot felt this need and possessed great lyric power is, of course, beyond need to contend, but it is also evident that corpus of his work contains few poems that one would label in entirety lyric; no sonnet series, no pourings out of his heart to beloved, nor to reader for that matter. Instead we have lines, passages of a beauty incomparable in modern verse, but they are passages embedded in a scaffolding of allusion and reference camouflaging poet's solitude, or so ordered as to engage mind in universal questions rather than to express individual experience. There is always hidden smile or stifled cry as though lyric lines escape, break out, rather than deliberately express his feeling. The early poems provide instances: Prufrock recalling sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown and mermaids singing who, he thinks will not sing to him; young man in Portrait of a Lady who keeps his counsel, Except when a street-piano, mechanical and tired Reiterates some worn-out common song With smell of hyacinths across garden Recalling things that other people have desired (20)(1) or in Preludes ... fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing (23) imprisoned in a sordid city block. …