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Notes . . . from T. S. Eliot
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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• Perhaps I can give this discussion [of the three aims of education] more appearance of reality, or at least provide light relief in the way of something more apprehensible, by asking “what sort of education should a poet have?” I don’t think any parents have ever brought up a child with a view to his becoming a poet; some parents have brought up their children to be criminals; but for good and loving parents a poet is almost the last thing they could want their child to be, unless they thought it was the only way to save him from becoming a criminal. I suppose that poets, during their tender years, usually show an interest in language and expression, and give some indication of a bent for the study of languages rather than science. This is not always true: I have known men who in childhood seemed to their parents to give promise of becoming Humphrey Davys or Clerk Maxwells, and suddenly shifted their interest to literature at 15 or 16. Certainly, the fact that a child writes verses is no indication whatever of future aptitude. Nearly everybody has written verses: a wise parent should not discourage the habit; but should attach no significance to it. But if the young poet is of the usual kind, he will probably excel in his languages, particularly his own; and is likely to be of the type which flourishes on Latin and Greek. Certainly, the poet in later life ought to be equipped with a good knowledge of Latin and Greek literature, make himself fluent in one modern language besides his own, and have a reading knowledge of several others. How few of us, however, satisfy that qualification: I certainly do not. But what else should he study, from the point at which it is evident at least that a literary education is the most suitable for him? In the first place, he usually has to make his living, and poetry is conspicuously the occupation by which no one can expect to make a living. For most men, there is the conflict between the claims of the occupation which they make their chief concern in life, and the claims of the latent powers and faculties. But the poet has a threefold problem to solve; he must earn a living, he must practice and perfect himself in writing, and he must cultivate other interests as well. He must do the last, not merely in order to exercise latent powers, not in order to become a cultivated man; but because he must have other interests in order to have something to write about. Almost no form of knowledge comes amiss, besides of course the knowledge of as much of the best poetry in several languages as he can assimilate, because without other intellectual interests his experience of men and women, his understanding of human emotions even, will be very narrow. The condition is that everything should be grist that comes to his mill; that he should have a lively curiosity in what men have thought and done, and be interested in these things for their own sake. He is perpetually engaged in solving the problem that every man must solve for himself, that of relating every human activity to his own; and he cannot tell how much, or what, of the subjects he investigates will be directly useful to him as a poet. But his poetry will inevitably be affected by what he knows, and the more he can assimilate the better. And finally, he has the problem of finding a livelihood; he has sometimes to choose between a dull routine which provides little or no food for his mind, or an active and interesting one which leaves him very little time and energy. For some, this livelihood can be in various forms of journalistic or para-literary occupation; in teaching and lecturing: I even know a poet who writes very good detective stories.
