Review: Poems in Counterpoint

Author(s): John Gould Fletcher

Review by: John Gould Fletcher
Source: Poetry, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Oct., 1943), pp. 44-48
Published by: Poetry Foundation
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PO ET R Y: A Magazine of Verse

to another-nevertheless indicated that a courageous poet work

ing in the theatre on his own terms can still command the re
spect of an audience. There are few modern poets who cannot
profit by the example of Lorca's tenacity of dramatic purpose,
and there are few dramatists who can afford to overlook the treas
ure which his imaginative consistency brought to the theatre.
Edwin Honig

REVIEWS

POEMS IN COUNTERPOINT

Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot, Harcourt Brace.

THE great beauty of T. S. Eliot's latest book-and it is a
Ilong time since there has been a book of poetry in which the
form and the matter seem so appropriate to each other-need
not blind anyone to the fact that in each poem of this series, Eliot
is dealing with a theme not frequently tackled in modern poetry:
the theme of the relation of a supernaturally revealed religion
to man, and the question of what man, temporal and accidental
as he is, can make of this revelation. The intellectual scheme
of each poem in the series represents a further stage in the poet's
search for personal adjustment to a set of values already given
him by the creed he has embraced; and it is this set of fixed and
unalterable values, as given by such Catholic mystics as Saint
John of the Cross and Dame Juliana of Norwich, that form the
framework on which the personal quests of the poet for values
that transcend his local and temporal circumstances are set up.
The question of the meaning of the whole series has already
been ably discussed by James Johnson Sweeney in an article

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 Poems in Counterpoint

in the July issue of POETRY, and need not be further dealt

with at this point. What I wish to stress is the relation of the
content to the form and the degree in which the form combines
with the content to produce that "willing suspension of disbelief"
which is so characteristic of poetry.
The title Four Quartets suggests immediately a musical struc
ture, something on the lines of my own Symphonies or Elegies
or Conrad Aiken's Preludes. And it is in this respect that I
find Eliot's achievement most impressive. This is the work of
a better poet than the Eliot who wrote either The Waste Land
or Ash Wednesday. Where the themes of The Waste Land were
in brutal juxtaposition, and violently dashed with each other
-few poems ever written have been so lacking in transition
passages, in progress from detail to detail as this one-and where
the main theme of the latter (the abandonment of temporal love)
carried with it details that did not immediately convince one as
being appropriate to their purpose, the relation of detail to the
main structure here is nothing short of masterly. The Four
Quartets, in their use of leit motifs and variation, in their con
trapuntal effect, are the work of a theologically-minded poet
determined to explore difficult ground, the ground of the tech
nical analogies between poetry and music. They are by intention
and accomplishment musical poems.
But what is a musical poem? Eliot himself has supplied the
answer, in a lecture, The Music of Poetry, which was reprinted
as an essay in The Partisan Review for November-December,
1942; an essay which I think might have served admirably as an
introduction to the Quartets themselves, inasmuch as it offers the
best possible explanation of them on the technical side. As he
points out in this essay, it is quite common among poets for "a

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PO ET R Y: A Magazine of Verse

poem, or a passage of a poem-to realize itself first as a particular

rhythm before it reaches expression in words." In other words,
the way a poem should sound as rhythm usually presents itself
to a poet before the actual words of the poem are set down.
Poets are people who go about with tunes in their heads: and
whether the tunes employed be those of Mallarme or Eliot, or
of Kipling and Robert Tristram Coffin, makes all the difference.
The other sense in which the analogy of music holds good
for poetry is in the question of structure. The free verse revo
lution in poetry, coming in English-speaking countries between
1908 and 1914, had as its aim the bringing of poetry back to the
rhythm of conversational speech and the renewal of poetic struc
ture in that idiom. As Eliot says in the essay to which I have
already referred, "It was a revolt against dead form, and a prep
aration for new form, or a renewal of the old; it was an insist
ence upon the inner unity which is unique to every poem, against
the outer unity which is typical." Structure, however, must al
ways be a preoccupation of every important poet, whatever the
form employed; and the liberation preached by the free versiflers
-resulting in much bad prose and some good verse-has seemed
most intelligently applied when new devices, bearing a consider
able analogy to music, have enforced form on what might have
been otherwise formless. These devices are, roughly, the set
ting of the theme of a poem in several different and contrasting
rhythms (for example sad and humorous); the juxtaposition
in the same poem of passages of high lyric intensity with others
of conversational comment; the repetition of leading themes,
with variation; the amplification in sound-intensity possible be
tween the open and closed quality of vowel sounds; and finally,
the effect of contrapuntal recapitulation possible to sustain by

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 Poems in Counterpoint

returning to one's leading statements. All these devices have

their analogies in music; and it is because Eliot is not only
aware of them, but employs them with the utmost skill, that one
takes pleasure in his work as a poet.
Is this the only reason why, as a poet, he remains so impor
tant today? So far as I am concerned, it is. I do not share his
scheme of beliefs, which are familiar to anyone who has read
deeply in the Catholic mystics; I am appalled by any method of
salvation which implies the emptying out, of all human sensation
in favor of a demand for a mirade:
Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one annunciation.
The negative way to salvation, as recommended by the ortho
dox, seems to me largely valueless in the present crisis. Rather
is it important for most men, who have either lost God or never
found Him in the existing churches, to build up God again
through the operation of the sense of human solidarity. The
ideal of man, rather than of race or creed, the proof of human
character through suffering and endurance, the achievement of
something resembling a moral conscience-it is for these things
we should strive again today, as never before. The Little Gid
dings of this world can shed little light on the problem that has
come upon this age with renewed force-the problem of creat
ing, while we fight for it, a true democracy. To solve that prob
lem we have to start, not with God as defined by the theologians,
but with man, and his relationship towards his fellows. Modern
science, though it may help towards a solution, cannot provide
one. There is, be it remembered, a mysticism implicit in de
mocracy-a system of beliefs possibly not worked out with the

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POETRY: A Magazine of Verse

clarity of detail of the medieval schoolmen, but declaring just as

surely as Dame Juliana of Norwich that "All shall be well and
all manner of thing shall be well."
John Gould Fletcher

THE UNSPOKEN WORD

New Poems, by Dylan Thomas. The Poets of the Year, New

Directions.
The whole problem of poetic obscurity, in modern Anglo
American literature, requires elucidation. The more obscure a
poet's work, it seems, the more discussion it will provoke and
the more public his private language or mythology will thus
become. For the public of modern poetry is intent on discover
ing, in its favorite poets, the most hermetically sealed worlds;
and the modern poet, intent on pure self-expression, avoids com
municating anything at all public, anything which, he thinks,
might have been thought, felt or worded in the same way by
any other poet. By isolating himself completely, so it seems,
the modern poet communicates paradoxically with a reasonably
large public which is not interested in the public language and
mythologies of more traditional communication. Even Louis
Untermeyer, a traditionalist, recognizes the importance of this
trend when, in a revised edition of his standard anthology, he
includes Dylan Thomas.
But this new obscure poetry, though gaining in documentary
value by offering us cryptic insights into the poet's private world,
yet tends to defeat its own purpose:
You my friend there with a winning air
Who palmed the lie on me when you looked
Brassily at my shyest secret. . ..

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