Fake News: A Note on T.S. Eliot and Byron

In his 1937 essay ‘Byron’ T.S. Eliot wrote:

‘One reason for the neglect of Byron is, I think, that he has been admired for what are his most ambitious attempts to be poetic; and these attempts turn out, on examination, to be fake: nothing but sonorous affirmations of the commonplace with no depth of significance. A good example of such imposture is the well-known stanza at the end of Canto XV of Don Juan:

Between two worlds life hovers like a star,‘Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.[…]

[…] verses which are not good for the school magazine.’

Yet in section II of his 1942 Little Gidding, an encounter with the ‘familiar compound ghost’ of Dante and others in the pre-dawn following a WW2 London air raid, Eliot wrote:

In the uncertain hour before the morning   Near the ending of interminable night   At the recurrent end of the unendingAfter the dark dove with the flickering tongue

   Had passed below the horizon of his homing…But, as the passage presents no hindrance   To the spirit unappeased and peregrine   Between two worlds become much like each other,So I find words I never thought to speak

It would appear that, in Byron’s verse, Eliot recalled words to enhance his description of this multifaceted poetical encounter, thereby enriching its complexity, consciously or otherwise. This seems to me an example of how a great poet might steal; others may of course perceive a closer affinity with Don Juan itself.

29 January 2020