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

Poetry, Speech and Music

TSE composed this unpublished lecture for his five-week tour of neutral Sweden (from late Apr through 24 May 1942) under the auspices of the British Council. Under the subheading “Light in Scandinavia,” the Times Literary Supplementreported on 9 May 1942: “Mr. T. S. Eliot, who is in Sweden lecturing on behalf of the British Council, is talking to his audiences on ‘Poetry in the Theatre’ and ‘Poetry, Speech and Music.’ These lectures are attracting much interest and many Swedish newspapers have published long interviews with Mr. Eliot” (1). The present lecture is closely related to “The Music of Poetry,” sharing a number of major points and some language with that lecture, which was written two months earlier. TSE reported to John Hayward on 2 Feb that he had “dashed off” “The Music of Poetry” for Glasgow University, and on 30 Mar that he planned to begin work on “Poetry, Speech and Music” the following day. “The Music of Poetry” was published as a pamphlet on 30 Aug, and in time TSE came to think of it as the more finished piece; he told Ronald Bottrall on 4 Nov 1947 that “Poetry, Speech and Music is really superseded by the lecture on the music of poetry which I gave in Glasgow in 1944” (i.e., 1942).

The twenty-page typescript (with pen-and-ink corrections) includes a holograph address on top margin: British Council, Birger Jarlsgatan 15, Stockholm, Sweden.

The title I have chosen, for what I am going to talk about, may, I fear, sound depressingly abstract and technical. So I want to excuse it at once, by saying that it represents an indirect approach to what I suppose you would like me to talk about. The subject on which I am supposed to be something of an authority, and the one, therefore, on which people are most willing to listen to me, is modern English poetry: and what they usually want is an explanation, which should be as precise as the answer to a riddle. They want to be made to feel that they understand it – sometimes they want to learn to enjoy it, and sometimes they merely want to be able to give a good reason for not enjoying it. Now, in one sense, I do know more about contemporary English poetry than almost anyone else does: I am in a position in which I have to read a great deal of poetry before it is published, including, by the way, a good deal that never does get published. So it is difficult for me, as we say, to see the wood for the trees: it has been much more my business to notice the difference between one poet and another, than to mark the general characteristics of the poetry of our time; and my position is complicated by the fact that I write a little myself. For the writer of verse is not always the best judge of the verse of his contemporaries: he may overrate those who are moved by a similar spirit to his own, and misunderstand those whose spirit, though equally modern, is different. For these reasons I am diffident about discussing modern poetry directly, either as a whole or in detail. So I want to approach it indirectly: by putting before you certain views about English poetry in general, and its history in the last four or five hundred years, which, I hope, may help to explain its general situation today, and the general reasons why it is as it is.

When I speak of general characteristics of English poetry, I do not propose to concern myself with the characteristics which English poets have in common with other Englishmen, and of which they may be the more or less unconscious mouthpieces. I am not concerned with the expression of an ethos, any more than I am with an interest in wild birds, a fondness for dogs, or a taste for roast beef. I am concerned only with the nature of the English language which the poets have had in common, and with...