The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical EditionVol. 6: The War Years, 1940-1946

[The Last Twenty-Five Years of English Poetry]

On 27 Feb 1940 TSE wrote to John Hayward that he was “considering an invitation from the British Council to go in May to Italy for a fortnight to lecture at six places from Palermo to Milan. I ask them what they want me to lecture about (I hope not Spender & Auden) and in what language, as I can’t attempt Italian anyway.” Among the subjects offered, he informed Hayward on 7 Mar, were “Eng. Metaphysical or religious poetry, and a modern subject. The last is difficult, because the point is to persuade the wops [Italians] that there is a terrific eruption of English poetry in our time.” On 5 Apr TSE sent him “the first draft of my Italian lecture on Modern Poetry. It will have to be much rewritten and boiled down and punctuated with simple and pleasant poetry readings.” He was supposed to leave on 20 May and return on or about10 June 1940, giving this and a second lecture, “Types of English Religious Verse” ( 6.46) at the British Institutes in Italy, but on 15 May he was advised by Robert Vansittart of the Foreign Office not to make the trip during wartime conditions: as TSE explained to Hayward, “it was not merely against my own interest, but against the public interest . . . because if I was mauled, the Ambassador would have to make a sharp protest, and that wouldn’t make relations any easier.” On Vansittart’s advice, Allan Rose of the British Council cancelled the visit; the two lectures were never delivered or published.

The untitled typescript of twenty-three pages, misdated 1939, is archivally titled (King’s).

The simplest way in which to understand the development of English poetry during the last twenty-five years, and the relative significance of those writers who have contributed to it, is to consider first what happens to any living language. A language that is not merely still spoken, but alive, is a language that is changing. It changes first in current speech, which reflects, often in very indirect ways, the social, material and spiritual changes happening to the people who speak it. The spoken language changes more rapidly than the written language; and the literary pioneers are those who, like Dante, dare to accept the vernacular speech and devote themselves to developing and refining it. One generation of poets put into circulation a particular idiom; the men who come after may improve it, and explore its further possibilities, without altering it. Sooner or later there comes a time when this poetic idiom is so out of date, so remote from the way men and women are talking, that it becomes a dead language no longer capable of expressing the thoughts and emotions of living men. The symptom of approaching 30death of a language and a civilisation is when men go on writing poetry in a style and vocabulary which has become meaningless to their less learned contemporaries. The task of poetic innovators, therefore, is to restore to verse the accents of living speech, and to give back to current speech, in exchange for what they take from it, a more highly developed instrument than men can fashion for themselves in the rough and ready use and traffic of conversation.

English poetry has been passing through one of these phases of renovation and change, phases which seem to tend to recur, under the conditions of modern civilisation, about once in a hundred years or a little more. With the revolutions of the past three hundred and fifty years, the names most representatively associated are those of Edmund Spenser, towards the end of the sixteenth century, of John Dryden a century later, and Wordsworth and Coleridge a century after him. As a background to the poetry of our time, I propose to consider the poetry of the nineteenth century as the development of the Romantic Movement of which Wordsworth and Coleridge were the pioneers. Thirty years ago, the first signs of another approaching change were visible in the work of...