Frances Rushworth wrote: > I originally intended to write asking if anyone knew what TSE saw as > the purpose of poetry in general and his own in particular. Was it > simply self-expression? I would still like to know - I have only read > the poetry, not the autobiographies or critiques. I always get the impression when reading Eliot's critiques of what a poet does that he generalizes on his own experience and feelings. At least to me, he doesn't seem to justify why all poets are included. I would think this would be a topic for some future time but it would mean that I would have to go back to his essays and I find that a royal pain. Anyway, here is a bit of Eliot on poets: T.S. Eliot in "The Three Voices of Poetry" (annotated by me): I agree with Gottfried Benn, and I would go a little further. In a poem which is neither didactic nor narrative, and not animated by any other social purpose, the poet[411] may be concerned solely with expressing in verse--using all his resources of words, with their history, their connotations, their music--this obscure impulse. He does not know what he has to say until he has said it; and in the effort to say it he is not concerned, at this stage, with other people at all: only with finding the right words or, anyhow, the least wrong words. He is not concerned whether anybody else will ever understand them if he does. He is oppressed by a burden which he must bring to birth in order to obtain relief. Or, to change the figure of speech, he is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of form of exorcism of this demon. In other words again, he is going to all that trouble, not in order to communicate with anyone, but to gain relief from acute discomfort; and when the words are finally arranged in the right way--or in what he comes to accept as the best arrangement he can find--he may experience a moment of exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation, which is in itself indescribable.[433] And then he can say to the poem: 'Go away! Find a place for your self in a book--and don't expect me to take any further interest in you.' Eliot's notes to TWL inserted by me into his "The Three Voices of Poetry" 411. Cf. Inferno, XXXIII, 46: ed io sentii chiavar l'uscio di sotto all'orribile torre. Also F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346. My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside;and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it. . . . In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul. 433. Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. 'The Peace which passeth understanding' is a feeble translation of the content of this word. Regards, Rick Parker P.S. Thanks for the thanks Frances, I often wonder how many of my links get followed. And I don't know how to translate "Dude, that's whack" either.