RECONFIGURING SELF, WORLD, AND WORD:
MODERNIST POETIC EPIPHANIES IN ELIOT, WILLIAMS, LEVERTOV, AND REVELL
Jessica G. Drexel
A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department
of English and Comparative Literature in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Chapel Hill 2019
Approved by: John McGowan
Eric Downing Gabriel Trop Tyler Curtain
ABSTRACT:
Jessica G. Drexel: Reconfiguring Self, World, and Word: Modernist Poetic Epiphanies in Eliot, Williams, Levertov, and Revell
(Under the direction of John McGowan)
This dissertation examines the occurrence of epiphanies in modernist and contemporary poetry. The time period addressed in this dissertation traces the development of poetic epiphanies through a series of related poets: T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams represent opposing approaches to poetry in the modernist era, while Denise Levertov and Donald Revell represent the extended influence of the earlier poets through the late-twentieth century and the present day. By surveying these four poets, I aim to establish a conception of post-Romantic transcendent experience in the form of an epiphany. The dissertation includes both secular and religious poetry, and I show how even traditionally religious approaches to epiphany are radically reconfigured through poetic form and innovative representations of dualistic distinctions. My research uses the prose works by these poets to establish a framework for interpreting their poetry; I also use this prose framework to challenge and add to leading interpretations of the epiphany in modernist poetry. Furthermore, I include extensive close-readings of the poetry.
I conclude that the epiphanies present in the work by these poets is fundamentally distinct from a traditionally Romantic or religious epiphany. Despite their many differences, these four poets employ an immanentist view of the cosmos, which means that dualistic distinctions exist, but that the space of transcendence and totality is at hand, and not cosmically distant. The
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation is the culmination of a long journey shaped by the kindness of many people. First, I thank my undergraduate mentors: David Jones, Eberhard Geyer, and Robert Blackstock. From my Master’s in Linguistics at UNC, I am indebted to the influence of my advisor Randy Hendrick and to Paul Roberge. From my doctoral work in Comparative Literature and English, I am grateful to Philip Gura for his class on American Transcendentalism and for first introducing me to William Carlos Williams’ poetry. I thank Joel Nickels, a conference co-presenter, and poet John Greening, for affirming my nascent interest in Levertov and
encouraging me to pursue her in my research. I am grateful to poet and scholar Donald Revell, for your support of my work and your generous correspondence about Levertov and Williams.
I am beyond grateful for my fellow UNC CoLEAGS graduate students—I cannot imagine better colleagues. Your camaraderie made graduate school rich, your intellect challenged me, and your friendship is dear. I am also grateful for the graduate student
communities I befriended at Duke University and Baylor University—thank you extending your warm collegiality to me.
wisdom, advocacy, passion for literature, and care for students have truly shaped me as a reader, scholar, and teacher.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ... 1
CHAPTER ONE: MUSIC, INCARNATION, AND THE CONTINUOUSLY PRESENT EPIPHANY IN T. S. ELIOT’S FOUR QUARTETS ... 11
A. INTRODUCTION AND EPIPHANY REVIEW ... 11
B. REVIEW OF SCHOLARLY APPROACHES TO THE EPIPHANY ... 13
C. MUSICAL PATTERN AND THE BEYOND ... 26
i. Introduction ... 27
ii. ‘Musical Pattern’—Double Existence in Drama ... 30
iii. “Necessary and dangerous” Duality ... 38
D. ‘MUSICAL PATTERN’:FROM POETIC DRAMA TO POETRY ... 43
i. ‘Musical pattern’ in Four Quartets ... 43
E. CLOSE-READING FOUR QUARTETS ... 49
i. Burnt Norton ... 51
ii. East Coker ... 55
iii. Dry Salvages ... 59
iv. Little Gidding ... 62
F. THE HINT HALF GUESSED ... 65
CHAPTER TWO: WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AS MODERNIST MYSTIC ... 70
B. TWO TRADITIONS OF TRANSCENDENCE ... 75
C. WILLIAMS AND RELIGION ... 75
D. TRANSCENDENTALISM ... 79
E. WILLIAMS REJECTS TRANSCENDENTALISM ... 81
F. WILLIAMS’MODERNISM:CREATION AND DESTRUCTION ... 85
G. POST-ROMANTIC UNITY ... 90
H. MODERNIST MYSTICISM ... 92
I. WILLIAMS’POETIC EPIPHANIES ... 99
CHAPTER THREE: FROM HELL AND BACK AGAIN: WILLIAMS’ EPIPHANY, FORGIVENESS, AND IMAGINATION ... 108
A. BEGINNING IN HELL ... 108
B. PERCEPTION ... 110
C. INNER PERFECTIONS ... 113
D. DANCE ... 127
E. RESISTANCE AND LIMITS ... 137
i. Dependence on others and the world ... 139
ii. Corruption Within ... 141
iii. Human Evil ... 156
iv. Despair and Descent ... 163
F. FORGIVENESS ... 168
G. MODERN TRANSCENDENCE ... 171
H. LANGUAGE AND FORM ... 172
A. FROM DUALISM TO MULTIPLICITY:VISIONS OF HEAVENS AND HELLS ... 176
B. DENISE LEVERTOV’S EPIPHANIES: POET OF THE BORDERLANDS ... 178
C. MODERN MEDIEVALISM:“COMPLEX AND MANIFOLD”PRESENCE ... 191
D. DONALD REVELL’S INHABITED SYMBOLS ... 195
INTRODUCTION
In this dissertation, I inquire how modernist and contemporary poets, specifically T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, and Donald Revell, access non-material states of being when deprived of traditional routes to transcendence. The twentieth century is an age that, as David Wellbery laments, is unprepared “to think that a form, however
compelling its unity, exemplifies the unity of mind or of nature or of both.”1 However, I follow Charles Taylor’s intuition that in a post-Romantic aesthetic, “The symbol as consubstantial is rejected. But the other basic idea, that it reveals something otherwise inaccessible, stands.”2 Modernists thus disrupt not only the Romantic concept of aesthetic form as a bridge to transcendence, but also traditional religious pathways to transcendence. And yet, through radically new poetic forms drawn from vernacular speech, musicality, and perception of the material, ordinary world, modernist poets still construct innovative
pathways to secular transcendence and mystical experience. In both cases, I conceptualize the epiphanic space as a recovery of cosmic unity, and the means of arriving at that space, the duration of the experience, the effects of the event, the reader’s participation, and the poets’ conception of unity are my primary interest.
1David E. Wellbery, “Romanticism and Modernity: Epistemological Continuities and Discontinuities,” European Romantic Review 21, no. 3 (June 2010): 287,
https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2010.484624.
2Charles Taylor, “Epiphanies of Modernism,” in Sources of the Self: The Making of the
While I will refer to the entire phenomenon and state of being as ‘transcendence,’ my specific focus is the epiphany, as it denotes a discrete occurrence of lived transcendence. Far from the ordinary acquisition of new knowledge, the epiphany is an exceptional arrival at knowledge. The knowledge is extraordinary, or to an excessive extent, and the path to it is remarkable or unusual. Furthermore, the exceptional qualities of the epiphany and the thing revealed induce delight, joy, wonder, and even ecstasy, making the epiphany a sought-after experience. While there are such things as Northrop Frye’s demonic epiphany and Walter Benjamin’s profane illumination, they lie beyond the scope of this dissertation.
The poetic epiphanies discussed here do not completely dissolve their foundations in religion and European Idealism, particularly with regard to dualism. In fact, they are
predicated upon dualism—the distinction between subject and object, self and other or world, and human and divine or beyond. However, the distance assumed in other pathways to transcendence is immense; it is a distance that demands bridges, symbols, and interpretive matrices, which, according to modernist poets like Williams, further alienate the self from world and word. In the poets discussed here, we find that dualistic distinctions exist, and indeed power the epiphanic experience, but they assume an intimacy between things that does not exist in the other pathways; I call this phenomenon proximate dualism. The beyond, they suggest, is not so far away. Instead of a bridge to the sublime, they offer a leap into the ordinary. The leap is experientially exceptional, but the subject is propelled into the ordinary and does not transcend beyond it. Encountering the ordinary is then exceptional because it is, perhaps, the first time the individual has beheld it as it is. In a way, the epiphany is to
person and its complement, and leaping across that divide is the epiphany. The leap reveals immediacy and intimacy between a thing and its complement, not the cosmic distance assumed in other pathways. A hallmark of these epiphanies is therefore an affirmation of the ordinary, material world, but while the ordinary is good, it is incomplete or only partially perceived, hence the need for an epiphany. The problem is thus alienation from wholeness, totality, plenitude, and unity; the alienation is not an innate deficiency in the ordinary, but a lack of this completeness.
The epiphany reveals a relationship between things, and the relationship is
emblematic for how the cosmos is already ordered (we just cannot see it, and each poet offers a different explanation for this blindness). While the revelation is abstract, its effect is
concrete, for the relationship reconfigures the individual’s relationship to self and the material world. The outcome of an epiphany is therefore paradoxical, since it aims to make the exceptional the norm without reverting to dogma, banality, or mere routine. The longing for wholeness is the basis of this dissertation, and I focus on four post-Romantic poets spanning the twentieth century, who take up this quest for wholeness. I argue that each poet should be considered a modernist, or post-Romantic, on the basis of how they conceptualize unity and how this conceptualization impacts their poetic form. Judging by form alone, each poet radically breaks with conventions of Romantic form, even when he or she may
occasionally adopt a lyric attitude. I also show how their formulations of secular mysticism and Christian spirituality radically shape their poetic form in new ways; although the poetry tends toward mystical experience, the poetry does not reinforce traditional forms of
pathways entails a rejection of wholeness itself, and to what extent the distinction between Romanticism and Modernism is due to form. I also question critical work that conflates the pathways with the end goal—can a poet reject Romantic form and still seek wholeness? Is an interest in wholeness symptomatic of an unacknowledged lapse into tradition? Is interest in an empirical whole basis for categorization as a quasi-religious pursuit? Or is there a third way?
I chose exclusively poetry for several reasons. First, it permits me to include a chronological angle throughout the dissertation, as this dissertation will span almost one hundred years—from T. S. Eliot’s 1919 ‘Hamlet’ essay to Donald Revell’s 2018 collection of poetry, The English Boat. Focusing on one genre throughout time brings coherence and unity to the study. But more importantly, poetic epiphanies are fascinating because they occur outside the thematic and formal demands of narrative genre. While there are certainly strong narrative components in modernist poetry, the medium allows words and language to enact and explore spirituality, emotion, perception, and experience more directly, without being filtered through a narrative structure. In a narrative work, there is typically a dominant “present” located in the actions, characters, chronology, and plot-structure, and other
presences can only be arrived at through interpretation. A poem, however, more easily compresses attendant associations, presences, and meanings equally into the language and non-narrative structure of the poem. All associations can be present simultaneously. Words thus configure states of being and attitudes toward the world, and the entire poem enacts wholeness. The structure of these poems often—in their brevity, spatialization of
attitude, not action and plot. Things are reconfigured, even when nothing happens. While a similar effect can be achieved in novels and other narrative genres, poetic configuration enables us to experience the multiplicities of presences apart from action.
I also examine the implications for language in the framework of proximate dualism. Without an immense gap between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the third space—the bridge—is removed. Language and poetry no longer occupy that between space, and they are then shared equally between self and world. I even argue that language is more thing-in-itself in this formulation than in frameworks that place language and art entirely in the space between dualistic poles. Due to this proximity of language to both ordinary and epiphanic space, I assert that in place of narrative, fixed forms, and lyricism, these poets emphasize the senses—vivid imagery, spatial configuration of abstract concepts, the mingling of ordinary speech and musicality, and also musicality as a method of ordering ineffable meanings. Each poet also employs a different sensorial modality for experiencing epiphany: Eliot is
aims and poetic practice within a poet’s own oeuvre. My project begins with T. S. Eliot, who is part of the epiphany canon, but who quite often appears alongside novelists like Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce, and Mann in scholarly work. Eliot’s epiphany will hinge upon the
theological metaphysics of Christ’s incarnation, the presence of Pentecost, and music; I am unaware of other scholars who link Eliot’s theology with his concept of music. Eliot’s theology cites original sin as the cause of alienation from the ordinary, a key point in the musical goals of Four Quartets. The Eliot chapter comprises three parts: first, an in-depth overview of scholarship on epiphanies; second, a comprehensive overview of the concept of ‘music’ and ‘musical pattern’ in Eliot’s prose work; and third, an interpretive reading of Four Quartets, with special attention given to the relationship between epiphanic moments, the incarnation, Pentecost, and Eliot’s prose concept of music.
problem I anticipate is the more recent push to read Williams through American Pragmatism. While I agree with this scholarship in its explanation for totality in Williams’ metaphysics, I sense that the mystical dimensions of his aesthetics are overlooked in the Pragmatism analysis. In the second Williams’ chapter, I apply the framework of Kora to a selection of poems drawn from throughout Williams’ career, starting with Spring and All (1923) and concluding with selections from Journey to Love. Among other poems, I focus on a mid-career poem entitled “When Fresh, It Was Sweet,” and on Williams’ famous late-mid-career poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” While Paterson is relevant to my project, its length and complexity are beyond the scope of this project. Instead, I aim to build a more thorough and comprehensive analysis of Williams by examining shorter poems from throughout his life.
while they retain the poetic style of Williams and his descendants, gone is the fear of
association. Instead, they embrace multiplicity of associations that results in an immanentist enthusiasm for the material world. Ultimately, I claim that what we find in these poets is an amalgamation of Medieval and modernist approaches to symbolism, presence, and poetic form. The texts I choose for this final chapter include several well-known essays and lectures by Levertov, which I use to read a selection of mid- and late-career poems from several of her secular and Christian collections. For Revell, I turn to his book The Art of Attention, as well as a brief e-mail correspondence about his work and Levertov’s. From these materials, I turn to his most recent collection of poetry, The English Boat.
There are a few more issues that should be addressed in this introduction. Time is a major dimension that figures prominently in these epiphanic poems. While wholeness can be conceived of intellectually, and some may posit that totality exists in some dimension of reality, the lived experienced in time is a different matter. For Eliot’s Four Quartets, the presence of plenitude is ruptured, but he seems to find a solution through the ongoing Pentecostal presence. This temporal stretching of wholeness throughout all time is complemented by the material presence of the incarnation in historical time. Eliot’s metaphysical framework is correlated to the aesthetic potential of his prose concept of ‘music.’ Williams conversely finds an unruptured presence through time to be the source of alienation. For him, the associations that accumulate from lived-experiences form an interpretive matrix similar to orthodoxy, dogma, and formal modes of interpretation.
Atomism becomes a problem later in his career, however, and is a central focus of
“Asphodel.” In this poem, the poet stands by his early approach and introduces forgiveness as a counterpart to and extension of the imagination mode of perception. And finally, time in Levertov and Revell does not seem as problematic as it does to the first two poets. It seems to be a tremendously generative dimension, and both poets aim to make as many things as present as possible. Theirs is a poetry of rich presences drawing on history, memory, spirituality, psychological associations, and symbolic matrices found in literature and the arts. A central argument I develop throughout the dissertation is that each poet moves toward a reality in which epiphanic wholeness is materially real and continuously present. The epiphany starts out as a bounded event or experience, but each poet envisions a way of relating to the ordinary world and others with an ongoing or recurring sense of totality. To accomplish this, their poetry documents and models both the wholeness itself and how to perceive it.
This leads to the final question of the poet’s relationship to the reader: does the poet document his or her epiphany for the reader? Does he or she intend the reader, in reading the poem, to experience an epiphany, and is it the same epiphany as the poet’s? My answer is that there is a primary epiphany—that of the poet, and a secondary epiphany—that of the reader. The writing of the poem, and perhaps also its subsequent interpretation, is also epiphanic because both actions are modes of perception and discovery. The primary epiphany, in which the poet experiences or sees something exceptional in an exceptional way, occurs in real life and actually precedes the existence of the poem. This means that the poetic epiphany is a different thing than the primary epiphany, as in Levertov’s “The
implicitly, the vision of wholeness experienced in real life; in this sense, the poem documents the primary epiphany itself. A second function, however, is to bring the reader to an
epiphanic perception of wholeness. In this sense, the poet uses the poetic structure to model
CHAPTER ONE:MUSIC,INCARNATION, AND THE CONTINUOUSLY PRESENT EPIPHANY IN T.S.
ELIOT’S FOUR QUARTETS
A. Introduction and epiphany review
Epiphany in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is the contextualized point of contact between time and timelessness, part and whole, immanence and transcendence, and the concrete and abstract. This nexus assumes a type of dualism, but prior to the twentieth century, it was posited that these binaries would rarely meet, if ever, in the same time and place. One binary could be transcended through religious revelation or through intellectual and abstract thought or through aesthetic experience, but in the twentieth century, these pathways and the existence of dualistic spheres is called into question. Michael Bell describes modernism as “both critically and creatively… centrally concerned with the relations between literary form and modes of knowledge or understanding.”3 Thus, as traditional epistemological systems of intellectual, religious, or intuited meaning no longer provided a means of knowing and understanding the world, there arises new interest in what a thing is. This interest is not a quest for the thing in its symbolism or abstracted, Platonic form, but in its actual existence—its materiality, appearance, and the contextualized
conditions in which it occurs and is available for relational contact.4 Implicit in this approach
3Michael Bell, “The Metaphysics of Modernism,” in Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 11.
is the understanding that the things we encounter contain everything needed to interpret their meaning in context; things mean what they are, or as Wittgenstein puts it, “the meaning of a word is its use.” This is not to say that discovery of what a thing is is determinative; a thing is not necessarily fixed apart from its dynamic context.5 The implication of this worldview, as Bell calls it, is that when epistemological and interpretive distances vanish, so does the possibility for epiphany. Epiphanies are pleasant, exhilarating, even joyful experiences of discovery and new understanding; they are the surprise of unexpected disclosure. For this experience to occur, there must be division of and distance between known and unknown, self and other, subject and object; the spatio-temporal actualization of this contact is the epiphany.
Thus, in a one-dimensional framework where things interpret themselves, the epiphany is somewhat of an anomaly. In Four Quartets, Eliot draws on Christian theology, but his poetic epiphanies are composed without simply returning to prior modes of
transcendence. Instead, the conditions for epiphany in Quartets hinges upon Eliot’s prose concept of ‘music’ and ‘musical pattern,’ which I show is directly associated with the doctrine of the incarnation. Epiphany—the contact between the ordinary world and its inaccessible counterpart in a dualistic framework—materializes spatially in the incarnate body of Christ, and is continuously present in the Pentecostal fire. From the body and the fire, Eliot uses the modality of music to access, convey, and experience this epiphanic wholeness. As a modernist poetic epiphany, this approach retains binary divisions, but it
representing some greater, inhuman will), instead of what she feels according to the human conception’” (Bell, 13).
removes the spatio-temporal distance between them; this ultimately leads to an immanentist poetry that prioritizes non-symbolic engagement with the material world. I advance an interpretation of Four Quartets that posits the presence of two roses, two fires, and two possible cosmoses. Burnt Norton introduces a cosmos of physically and temporally bounded bodies and presences; in this world, the epiphany is limited to memory and possibility, and the disclosure of wholeness is temporary and abstract. As we progress through East Coker
and Dry Salvages, the images of fire and rose undergo a gradual transformation as the poet presses and examines the boundaries of time and ordinary modes of perception. In Little Gidding, through the mode of musical patterning, we arrive at a new kind of epiphany: one that is predicated upon a body that bridges the gap between human and divine, time and eternity. We also discover that the wholeness arrived at in the disclosure of the incarnation is not a temporary experience. Through Pentecostal fire, the epiphanic moment becomes simply an epiphanic mode of new vision and continuous presence of wholeness. In this chapter, I outline several ways that scholars define the epiphany; I show how Eliot defines his version of epiphany—the ‘musical pattern’ and the ‘beyond’; and I present an interpretive framework for Four Quartets by close-reading a series of passages from the poem.
B. Review of Scholarly Approaches to the Epiphany
“has become an obstacle to understanding, an arid formula for cranking out unnecessary interpretations” of Joyce’s work. In spite of the danger cited by Scholes, I aim to outline several critical approaches to the literary epiphany including theological, mythological, psychological, formal, social, and phenomenological formulations. There is natural rapport between some approaches, such as between the psychological and the aesthetic or between phenomenological and theological, but each approach depends upon fixed presuppositions about literary genres, poet and text, subject and object, and reader-response.
For Northrop Frye, the epiphany is a transition point between order and chaos in a mythic structure—the natural cycle and apocalypse, ideally situated on “a mountain-top just under the moon, the lowest heavenly body.”6 In Frye’s summary, the epiphany is an
archetypal phenomenon in a mythic context, and it can be a moment, an experience, a state, or a place; it is an “arrival at the summit of experience in nature,” and ultimately a point of transformation and manifestation of the “risen hero” in comedy.7 Because the epiphany signals climax, transformation, and transition, Frye also posits a “demonic epiphany” unique to tragedy and satire. Whereas the typical epiphany precedes the hero’s climax or final
glorious radiance, demonic epiphany precedes the moment of total collapse. Frye asserts that, [T]he fifth phase, corresponding to fatalistic or fifth-phase tragedy, is irony in which the main emphasis is on the natural cycle, the steady unbroken turning of the wheel of fate or fortune. It sees experience, in our terms, with the point of epiphany closed up…. That brings us around again to the point of demonic epiphany… the goal of the quest that isn’t there.8
6Northrop Frye, “Third Essay: Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths,” in Anatomy of
Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Robert Denham, vol. 22 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000): 190. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bayloru/detail.action?docID=3261261. 7Ibid., 191, 200.
Both versions of epiphany are a point of transformation and manifestation which signal or instantiate a transition to the narrative’s conclusion. A character assumes and is revealed in his final state, and the mythic quest nears its end.
The theological approach to epiphany is less interested in structural qualities of a narrative, and instead focuses on the etymological sense of “showing forth” and “displaying” a cosmically distant divinity or divine truth.9 This approach is well represented by Florence Walzl’s essay in 1965, whose goal was to explore the influence of the liturgical epiphany, marked by its cyclical formation, on Joyce’s secular literary epiphany. Drawing on Joyce’s unambiguously Catholic background, she highlights his definition of epiphany as a “spiritual manifestation.” Walzl also notes that Joyce originally called his epiphanies “epicleti,” a theologically pregnant term denoting “invocation of the ancient mass liturgies which besought God the Father through the Holy Spirit to transform the bread and wine into the body of Christ.”10 Walzl asserts that the theological origins of epiphany’s cyclical structuring and “planes of symbolic meanings and correspondences” are reflected in the narrative
structures and characterization in Joyce’s Dubliners and Finnegan’s Wake. She concludes that “Joyce describes the process of epiphany ‘as a seeking for spiritual perspective or light,” and she quotes Joyce in Stephen Hero explaining “the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus,” and “the moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised.” From that moment of clarified perception springs the “sudden spiritual
9Florence Walzl, “The Liturgy of the Epiphany Season and the Epiphanies of Joyce,” PMLA 80, no. 4 (1965): 426.
manifestation,” which is the epiphany.11 Overall, the theological approach to epiphany emphasizes the Greek etymology of a showing forth, display, or disclosure of an object; such disclosure forms the basis of Joyce’s aesthetic disruptions of ordinariness.
In contrast to the mythological and theological readings of epiphany, the
psychological approach places the subject at the center of the epiphany. Also drawing on Joyce’s definition of epiphany, the psychological readings of Leon Edel, Morris Beja, and Ashton Nichols emphasize a subject’s experience of perceiving the world. Focusing on the fiction of Proust, Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Woolf, and Faulkner in The Psychological Novel 1900-1950, Edel defines the epiphany as the “functioning of the creative imagination: what occurs in the mind before he begins the difficult act of recording and communicating his
experience…. [which] might be largely an atmosphere and a state of feeling, as complex and subjective in the reader as in the experience of the writer.”12 Edel’s definition stands in stark contrast to the divine manifestation of the religious approach and the point of crisis in the mythic approach. In Edel’s psychological formulation, the epiphany is not primarily a literary device, function, or event, but instead describes an aesthetic experience that occurs prior to the text’s formation. Furthermore, the epiphany is a function of interiority rather than an outward manifestation involving a subject and object. Whereas other approaches emphasize materiality and ordinariness, Edel links the epiphanic experience with time and linguistic expression; for Joyce in particular, “sounds, words, like thoughts, are experienced in time and
11Ibid., 441.
they have been, from primitive day, man’s means of giving vocal expression to emotion.”13 The epiphanic experience thus imparts structure and form to an otherwise amorphous state, which can then be converted into an aesthetic text.
Morris Beja’s Epiphany in the Modern Novel (1971), also a psychological approach, focuses on significant experience and the use of language to draw structure and meaning out of experience. While the epiphany replaces transformative spiritual, and therefore religious, experience, epiphany in the modern novel has a residue of spirituality but lacks a grounding in religiously derived meaning. With the absence of religion, he notes “a continuing need— perhaps even an intensified one—[that] has been felt for meaningful, unifying, “spiritual” emotions or experiences that would provide men with answers to some of their burning questions.”14 The psychological epiphany therefore replaces “the divinely inspired moment of new knowledge” as an opportunity to explore “the most complex experiences and the most subtle themes”15 in novels like those by Joyce, Woolf, Wolfe, and Faulkner. This approach switches focus from a divinity or truth revealed to the self-contained experience of such a revelation.
In 1987, Ashton Nichols takes the psychological approach in a fresh direction by distinguishing the “new literary epiphany,” which has roots in Wordsworth’s spots of time, from “divine inspiration, religious conversion, and mystical vision.”16 Nichols makes several
13Ibid., 96.
14Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971): 21.
15Ibid.
16Ashton Nichols, “The New Epiphany,” in The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth Century
key points throughout his argument: first, he describes religious epiphanies as revelatory moments that require “post hoc interpretation” to impart meaning to the thing or event, whereas the literary epiphany replaces theophanic revelation with a “form of purely secular revelation.”17 The secular epiphany hinges upon a “central psychological question: what is the relationship between an immediate perception and the value we ascribe to that
perception?”18 From here, Nichols contributes to the psychological approach by casting perception as a psychological event from which structures of meaning can be drawn and then funneled into a creative act. He writes,
[T]he literary epiphany leaves open the ultimate meaning of the experience. Gone is the sense that an event has only one interpretation. This view is replaced by a belief that experience is a function of a mind that ‘half perceives and half creates.’ The new epiphany occurs both in the mind of the poet and in the poem.”19
Nichols concludes by noting the literary epiphany’s effect on the reader: like myth, literary epiphany shows how “words manifest the power of language to reify experience.”20 In 1999, he refines his definition of epiphany thus: “In a sense, epiphany records the act of the mind noticing its own activity, commenting on its ability to perceive objects or experience emotions, remarking its power to press the data of consciousness.”21 In all of the
17Ibid., xii.
18Ibid., 4. 19Ibid., 21. 20Ibid., 31.
psychological approaches, interest in the object and alterity is shifted to the subject’s interior as a source of meaning and structure.
Charles Taylor’s approach inverts the psychological in that the words or images come first, and then the epiphany. Taylor’s chapter on “Modernist Epiphanies” in Sources of the Self distinguishes between Romantic epiphanies—“epiphanies of being”—which disclose an object in itself, and modern epiphanies, which “are not expressions of anything.”22 The modern epiphany is what Taylor calls a “framing epiphany” because it reveals patterns and emotions, not ontologically significant beings. The thingless-ness of the framing epiphanies profoundly impacts aesthetic form: “the epiphany comes from between the words or images, as it were, from the force field they set up between them, and not through a central referent which they describe while transmuting.”23 Modern poetry
[L]iberates us from the constricting conventional ways of seeing, so we can grasp the patterns by which the world is transfigured.... [Pound and Wyndham Lewis's work]... all exhibit a poetry that makes something appear, brings it into our presence. But it doesn't work like the old epiphanies of being, where the object portrayed expresses a deeper reality. It doesn't come to us in the object or image or words presented; it would be better to say that it happens between them. It's as though the words or images set up between them a force field which can capture a more intense energy.24 Although Taylor’s analysis is psychological in its attention to the formation of self through the interplay of patterns and amorphous meaning, he retains an emphasis on the formal composition of words and images in relation to epiphanies. Also, it is significant that Taylor highlights emotion and subjective experience while also focusing on external conditions: the
epiphany comes to the perceiver from outside the context of the psyche. Taylor also emphasizes the locale of the epiphany as exterior to the psyche—it is an “epiphany of
interspaces,” even though it is primarily perceived and experienced psychologically. Taylor’s distinction between the Romantic and the modern epiphany does not therefore fall along lines of interior and exterior, but between two types of objective revelation.Therefore, rather than downplaying the object, Taylor re-affirms the significance of a
[H]ard-edged, clear, highly particularizing portrayal of the object. When we’re dealing with an expressive object, we strive to see through it, for it is infused with deeper meaning. But when the object serves to frame an epiphanic space, it must stand out distinctly, in its full opacity: the more defined the frame, the more distinct the message.25
Robert Langbaum, too, approaches the epiphany primarily as an innovative literary structure based on imagination in his 1999 “The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature.” Langbaum’s approach, however, is thoroughly grounded in the
psychological approach, and he draws significantly from Beja’s work. He writes specifically about the epiphanic mode of seeing in contrast with habitual seeing.26 While the foundation of Langbaum’s study is psychological, he, too, shifts to a more technical interest in how the psychological epiphany shapes literary form. Moving from Wordsworth to modern fiction, he notes that the epiphanic mode contributes to heightened psychological association,
“momentaneousness,” and ultimately fragmentation in fiction. Literary epiphanies disrupt narrative time and consequently “spatialize” these moments of heightened perception. The
25Ibid., 477.
26Robert Langbaum, “The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature,” in
result is lyric stasis and silence instead of “objective narrative.”27 Langbaum points specifically to Joyce and Woolf to show how Wordsworth’s spots of time permeate twentieth-century literature.
Michael Sayeau builds on the formal aspects of literary epiphanies to shed new light on the everyday. In Sayeau’s analysis, the Joycean epiphany turns ordinariness into an epiphanic “anti-event” because it
[I]s a moment of change and development that opens an alternative… and/or signals the arrival of new meaning. The everyday, on the other hand, is the temporal ground where the event occurs and which it breaks. It was a day like any other but then… It is, as far as literary structure goes, the time and material that fills the space between events. But it is also the dialectical partner of the event, which would have no backdrop against which to emerge if not for it. As I will explain below, when literary works tamper with the conventional rhythms of narrative—that is, when they
somehow put out of order the customary pace of eventfulness—the everyday moves to the foreground and is registered as such. It was a day like any other. Full stop. The everyday is always there, but only begins to matter—and matter disruptively—when its rhythmical partner, the event, fails to arrive on time or at all.28
Sayeau will go on to argue that Joyce’s epiphanies are the antithesis of events because Joyce uses structural expectations to build toward an event, but what happens instead is a void of action. This approach to the Joycean epiphany revisits temporality and formalism in order to explore ordinariness and the everyday as social constructs. Sayeau directly calls into question the early critical approaches that assume revelation, disclosure, and manifestation at a point of crisis. While he takes a distinctly narratological approach to epiphany, he ultimately argues that the epiphany embodies the absence of action and a turn to ordinariness precisely at the critical moment.
27Ibid., 51.
28Michael Sayeau, “Introduction: In the Anteroom of the Event,” in Against the Event: The
Also interested in the everyday, Liesel Olson adopts a narratological approach evaluating the landscape against which epiphany occurs; if an epiphany is a moment of extraordinary insight, revelation, or experience, ordinariness is the social background that provides definition and opposition. Olson writes of the “paradox of the ordinary,” in which the ordinary is hegemonic as the inevitable backdrop of everyday life, but which also
paradoxically shocks us when it comes into focus. The epiphany startles an individual out of routine but does not transform or transcend, and the individual is delivered back to the everyday:
Modernist epiphany is often initiated by a banal moment; the "vulgarity of speech," as Stephen Dedalus explains, can elicit a "sudden spiritual manifestation" (SH 210). But the return to ordinary experience is inevitable, if not part of the epiphanic moment itself. Ordinary life becomes the context in which epiphany is subsumed,
reconsidered, and assessed in light of its continuity or its ability to actually change one's previous behavior. That is, the ordinary is often more politically efficacious than the moment of shock. As Peter Bürger has explained, aesthetic shock "is aimed for as a stimulus to change one's conduct of life," but the affective experience of being jolted out of the ordinary does not always offer a clear sense of how or what
one is meant to change" (Theory of the Avant-Garde, 80).29
While the ordinary is the basis of epiphany, it is also associated with bourgeoisie and middle-class norms,30 feminine domesticity, and routine.31 For Olson,
Beckett's disdain for the everyday may seem a far cry from Proust's aesthetic appreciation of the domestic and habitual, but both writers are simultaneously compelled and repelled by the banalities of modern life, and both are drawn to stylistic practices through which they might embody the everyday, especially its temporal dimension.32
29Liesel Olson, “Introduction: The Paradox of the Ordinary,” in Modernism and the Ordinary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009): 8.
Olson rightly highlights that epiphanies presuppose contexts of ordinariness, and that the modernist epiphany—in the absence of dualistic transcendence—is interested in recovering the ordinary, hence the “paradox of representing the unrepresented.”33
More recently, Gerald Gillespie’s 2010 “Epiphany: Notes on Applicability of a Modernist Term” in Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context brings epiphany
scholarship full circle. Acknowledging the religious origins of epiphany, Gillespie explains that, on the one hand, epiphany “can readily assume the thematic role of discovering a pattern in the besetting trivia,” and on the other, it “is simultaneously a valuable technical device liberating an author from such conventional barriers as chronology, genre, objectivity, and point of view.”34 For this latter reason, the epiphany is particularly suited to the features unique to psychological literature. Gillespie identifies three orders of “complex epiphany”, which are distinct from “episodic nuclei” and which can develop into “elaborate narrative structure[s].”35 The first order is “associated with the mental life of an aesthete or artist;”36 the second “is constituted when the point of view of such a guiding protagonist is
relativized.”37 Relativization of the author’s mental life with other equivalent voices renders
33Ibid.
34Gerald Gillespie, “Epiphany: Notes on Applicability of a Modernist Term,” in Proust,
Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context. (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003): 50–67.
the text a “polyphonic composition,” which leads to the third order, a “modern ecphrasis.”38 Ultimately, Gillespie asserts that the artist’s initial capacityfor illumination becomes a primary source of meaning and structure in fiction. However, once the author’s point of view is entered into a text and then relativized, the narrative is open to new possibilities for
symbolism and self-generating mythic interpretation. Thus, although the origin of meaning and structure is psychological and subjective, the final work of art returns to a mythic, albeit modernized text: “In the case of Joyce, at least, we observe a writer who strives for far more than the spatialization of consciousness in ironic signs when he helps us leave history and reenter myth through our experience of the symbolic structure of words.”39 Gillespie thus merges the psychological and the mythological in his reading of Joycean epiphanies.
In contrast with the form- and psychologically-derived conceptions of epiphany, Emmanuel Levinas develops a concept of epiphany almost entirely focused on the ontology of the other. According to Wyschogrod,
What Levinas calls the epiphany of exteriority brings into view the inadequacy of separated being; it is not an exteriority added on interiority so that together both form a totality. Each belongs to a radically different order of existence. Both the
sovereignty of separated being and the relation with the other person are characteristic of human existence.40
For Levinas, epiphanies are not subjective or interior experiences, but rather active exchanges involving disclosure and response between two separate beings. The locus of epiphany is the face of the other, in which the other’s being is revealed or disclosed in a state
38Ibid., 66.
39Ibid., 47.
40Edith Wyschogrod, “The Foundation of Ethical Metaphysics,” in Emmanuel Lévinas: The
of existential nudity. Levinas’ approach to epiphany in Totality and Infinity (1961) is in direct contrast to the psychological approach; he asserts that,
[T]he relation with the face is not an object-cognition. The transcendence of the face is at the same time its absence from this world into which it enters…. This gaze that supplicates and demands, that can supplicate only because it demands, deprived of everything because entitled to everything, and which one recognizes in giving (as one “puts the things in question in giving”)—this gaze is precisely the epiphany of the face as a face.41
Langbaum asserts the opposite:
[N]ote how difficult it is to distinguish the radiance of the object from the
luminousness of the mind that beholds it. That is because the object’s radiance is its inwardness, which is to say the beholder’s inwardness projected into it. The object is beheld at that point of intensity where it becomes an equivocally subjective-objective
image.42
This survey shows that conceptions of the epiphany have as much to do with critical predispositions as the epiphany itself. Using variations of the same core texts—by
Wordsworth, Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Mann, Eliot, and Faulkner—scholars have proposed a wide variety of definitions and explanations of literary epiphanies. I would like to offer an updated account of literary, and specifically poetic, epiphanies in the work of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Denise Levertov. In this study, I combine several aspects of the approaches described above. At its core, I assert that the poetic epiphany is the contact point between time and timelessness, part and whole, immanent and transcendent, subject and object. While this definition seems to assert dualism in the poetry of these three poets, I argue that the epiphany actually straddles both dualistic and non-dualistic conceptions of the world. The modernist epiphany assumes a version of these binaries, but it also collapses the distance
between them without entirely dissolving their distinctions. Whereas traditionally the religious and Romantic conceptions of epiphany turned on a completely separate sphere of divinity, form, will, or spirit, the modernist poetic epiphany employs dualistic binaries co-present in time and space. These poets do not directly challenge the existence of the binaries, but rather the distance between them. Because the co-presence of the binaries is always possible, the experience becomes de-temporalized and is accessible through time with proper perception. Williams calls this perception imagination, Eliot uses the language of poetry, music and prayer, and Levertov and Revell speak of attention. This process involves
elements of all of the above approaches—it necessitates innovative formulations of time; it is contingent upon contact with objective materiality, but also upon psychological and
subjective modes of perception and experience; it also demands an other or an object that actively discloses itself. And finally, I discuss how the modernist poetic epiphany has tremendous implications for poetic form and the reader’s response. I also discuss how the psychological account of epiphany emphasizes the collapse of narratological conventions; because of this, the non-narratival poetic epiphany is easily mistaken for a psychological occasion. However, I hold that while the poetic epiphany lacks the event and character structures inherent in narrative, modernist poetic epiphanies are not purely psychological phenomena, as they engage interior and exterior, subject and object, part and whole, time and timelessness.
C. Musical Pattern and the Beyond
“Too often, it seems to me, we assume that “seeing God” requires us to pass entirely beyond the material world. Or that we must move into a space so radically interior that the living world disappears from view. Neither of these ideas is consistent with the Christian
miracles, the great epiphanies at Mount Tabor and on the Sea of Galilee, the vision of God is mediated by the things of this physical world.”43
“Pater believed that the essence of poetry is in "an inventive handling of rhythmical
language," and that music represents an art in which form and idea are perfectly mingled.”44
i. Introduction
Much ink has been spilled about external musical influences in Four Quartets,45 but there is little scholarship linking Eliot’s own concept of a “musical pattern”—developed in numerous prose texts—and its relevance to Four Quartets. In this section, I identify the origins of this concept in Eliot’s 1919 essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” and I show how it develops up to 1937, when he first delivers his lectures on “The Development of
Shakespeare” and revisits his “Hamlet” essay. In the Shakespeare lecture-set, he relies heavily on the concept of “musical pattern” in drama, and he further develops the idea in “Aims of Poetic Drama” (1949) and “Poetry and Drama” (1951). In part, I assert that Eliot will use several terms interchangeably: ‘musical pattern,’ ‘music of poetry,’ ‘music of the play,’ and poetry as a ‘musical’ medium. Furthermore, Eliot uses the term ‘musical’ to describe the poetic dramatist’s apprehension of inexpressible emotions, of spiritual experience, and even of ineffable aspects of Christ’s incarnation in the context of theater.
43Douglas E. Christie, “Learning to See: Epiphany in the Ordinary,” Theological Studies
Faculty Works, Nov/Dec, no. Weavings 11:6 (1996): 8.
44Harvey Gross, “Music and the Analogue of Feeling: Notes on Eliot and Beethoven,” The
Centennial Review of Arts & Science, Summer, 3, no. 3 (1959): 269.
My primary goal is to transfer this concept to Four Quartets, an effort that is challenging since Eliot so thoroughly embeds the idea in discussions of drama. However, Eliot’s dream of writing “poetry beyond poetry”46 should be linked with his ‘musical pattern,’ which enables me to argue that his approach to musicality is grounded in poetry, and that the dramatic medium is helpful, but non-essential, in the transcendent aspirations of the poet. Thematic and imagistic patterning in Four Quartets cohere with the theory of a musical pattern, and drama embodies and spatializes poetry but is still an artificial ‘world.’ In
Four Quartets, we find traces of the theater in particularly epiphanic passages, but overall Eliot replaces the artificial context of the theater with real-world memories, history, geographical places, elements of the natural world, and the materiality of Jesus’ body.
I approach the epiphany in T. S. Eliot’s poetry through his prose work, where he introduces the concept of ‘musical pattern,’ an idea he often associates with drama, but which he also specifically aligns with the ‘poetic’ in drama. Through the concept of musical pattern, Eliot outlines how the poet and audience connect with the ‘beyond’ through ordinary and poetic language and eventually through the unifying materiality of Christ’s incarnation and the ongoing presence of the Holy Spirit. Four Quartets’ musical pattern organizes the interplay of embodied wholeness through the incarnation. Through the incarnation, the dualistic distance between spiritual and material is collapsed into one body with a ‘double existence.’47 And through Pentecost—the continuous presence of the Holy Ghost with
46Stated in his 1942 speech “The Music of Poetry,” which is documented in F. O. Mathiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot; an Essay on the Nature of Poetry, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947).
humankind throughout time—the dualistic distance between time and eternity is also
collapsed into one point. Dualistic distinctions within space and time, upon which epiphanic experience is contingent, are thus preserved, but the experiential distance between them lessens throughout the course of Quartets. The privileged moment of epiphanic vision in the rose garden of BurntNorton cedes to an ongoing, material, historically-grounded epiphanic reality toward the end of LittleGidding.
Eliot’s conception of music provides an aesthetic medium that essentially has one foot in the immediate, sensory world, and one foot in the transcendent space of a unified whole. Music also offers an alternative conception of time as it relates to form, allowing Eliot to create a space for epiphany that is distinct from narratological, psychological, and
traditional religious epiphanies. Furthermore, in Four Quartets, Eliot replaces the artificial double reality of drama with an authentic reality in history.48 Thus, the doubling that is so crucial to the musical pattern in his critical work on drama can play out in his poetry, which bypasses the dramatic context entirely, but still employs the epiphanic ‘musical pattern’ he so admires in drama. Finally, although epiphany typically occurs in specific moments and in certain conditions, Four Quartets ultimately stretches the experience of epiphany throughout time, rendering it ongoing and simultaneously ordinary and transcendent. Four Quartets can therefore be read as the process of moving epiphany as a specific heightened moment to an ongoing state of experience that is always partly in both the transcendent and the ordinary. The dual nature of music becomes tremendously useful in expressing the human-divine
duality that is collapsed in the incarnation, and in the infinite-historical ongoing presence of the Pentecostal fire. Through a musical and theological reading of Four Quartets, we see that Eliot pulls the transcendent epiphany into ordinary time and intertwines it with ordinary things.
ii. ‘Musical Pattern’—Double Existence in Drama
In many instances, Eliot highlights that music can express emotions beyond or incompletely captured through action. For instance, in “The Aims of Poetic Drama,” he writes that “great poetry… is dramatic… but it is more than dramatic and poetic. There emerges… a kind of musical pattern as well, which has checked and accelerated the pulse of our emotions without knowing it.”49 Capturing emotional experience is a separate plane of experience that accompanies actions, characters, and plot dynamics, and which Eliot calls a
double pattern,50 involving one pattern that orders the world within the drama and one that goes beyond the world of the drama (that is, ultra-dramatic or poetic drama). The musical pattern “intensifies the drama.”51
49T. S. Eliot, “The Aims of Poetic Drama,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical
Edition: A European Society, 1947–1953., ed. Ronald Schuchard and Iman Javadi, vol. 7 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 384.
50Ibid., 383.
51 T. S. Eliot, “Poetry and Drama,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical
Edition: A European Society, 1947–1953., ed. Iman Javadi and Ronald Schuchard, vol. 7 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 594.
Eliot takes great care to define the ‘world’ or ‘planes of reality’ that comprise and intersect in theatrical drama—and narrative forms more broadly—particularly with respect to his concept of ‘double worlds.’ In his first lecture on “The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse” (1937), he distinguishes between ordinary drama and ultra-drama (also called ‘poetic drama,’ and drama with a ‘musical pattern’); ordinary drama has only one ‘world,’ which is that of the narrative itself, whereas ‘ultra-drama’ has a double world. The dramatic, in contrast to poetic drama, is “what is effective on the stage for an audience.”52 That is to say, drama is simply a convincing narrative with characters, action, and conflicts; even if there are multiple planes of reality within the drama, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the world of the drama encompasses all of these. In contrast to ordinary drama, Eliot identifies a second type of play—poetic drama—in which the characters function in two planes:
I mean that from the time of his maturity—from Hamlet—there appears dimly
another plane of emotion, apprehensible through the music of the play—coming from the depths of Shakespeare himself, so that the people in the play have at least a double existence.53
‘Double existence’ is an idea to which Eliot returns frequently in his prose texts. An editors’ footnote to the Shakespeare lectures reveals that Eliot first mentions “double planes of reality in dramatic and fictional texts”54 in a 1924 essay:
52T. S. Eliot, “The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse. Two Lectures.,” in The Complete
Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934−1939., ed. Iman Javadi, Ronald Schuchard, and Jayme Stayer, vol. 5 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 536.
53Ibid., 550-551.
54T. S. Eliot, “A Neglected Aspect of Chapman,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The
What one gradually comes to be aware of is that in Dostoevski’s novels there are everywhere two planes of reality, and that the scene before our eyes is only the screen and veil of another action which is taking place behind it.55
Unlike the multiple planes of reality within the single world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, some narratives reach outside the world of the drama to a higher reality, which is abstract and emotional, and therefore musical. The audience participates in both realities. Dostoevsky and Chapman’s narratives exemplify this doubleness; while the authors and sometimes the audience are aware of the ultra-dramatic world, characters remain within the world of the immediate drama. In his essays in 192656 and 1934,57 Eliot revisits the concept of a double world in Dostoevsky and Chapman. In the latter essay, he clearly contrasts prosaic with poetic drama, linking doubleness with the poetic quality:
It is possible that what distinguishes poetic drama from prosaic drama is a kind of doubleness in the action, as if it took place on two planes at once. In this it is different from allegory, to which the abstraction is something conceived, not something
differently felt, and from symbolism (as in the plays of Maeterlinck) in which the tangible world is deliberately diminished—both symbolism and allegory being operations of the conscious planningmind. In poetic drama a certain apparent irrelevance may be the symptom of this doubleness; or the drama has an under-pattern, less manifest than the theatrical one. We sometimes feel, in following the words and behavior of some of the characters of Dostoevsky, that they are living at once on the plane that we know and on some other plane of reality from which we are shut out: their behavior does not seem crazy, but rather in conformity with the laws of some world that we cannot perceive. More fitfully, and with less power, this
doubleness appears here and there in the work of Chapman, especially in the two
Bussy D’Ambois plays.58 55Ibid., 555-553.
56T. S. Eliot, “Lecture V: Donne’s Longer Poems,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The
Critical Edition: The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926., ed. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber Ltd, 2014, 2014), 686–704. 57T. S. Eliot, “John Marston,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition:
Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934−1939, ed. Iman Javadi, Ronald Schuchard, and Jayme Stayer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 114–25.
The language of “an under-pattern, less manifest” and of “some other plane of reality from which we are shut out… some world that we cannot perceive” speaks of dualism inherent in the poetic drama, and it provides a landscape with tremendous potential for epiphanic experience. This hidden reality is approached through the musical pattern, not the dramatic pattern, and with this hiddenness comes the possibility of revelation. An artificial, but ordinary-feeling, world is needed to bridge the distance between ordinary life and the possible—but ordinarily inaccessible—emotions and spiritual experiences of the ‘beyond.’ The theater thus functions as partly ordinary and partly transcendent, and its ability to perform in both spheres at once makes it musical.
However, Eliot warns that, “One must be careful not to take this term ‘musical’ too literally”:
I mean that is it something over and above plot, development of character, and conflict of character: a pattern of action in which the characters more than act of themselves, and of speech expressing more than what the characters know or know they feel. Something is exhibited of which we have only rare glimpses in our daily life.59
The quality of being above and beyond the world of the simple drama is not less than drama, but something more, hence the term ‘ultra-dramatic.’ The experience of writing and watching the ultra-dramatic is a form of transcendence, but one which begins with language “beyond the limited needs of expressing the thoughts and shades of a feeling of a particular character at a particular moment.”60 The ultra-dramatic thus pushes beyond the spatio-temporal
boundaries of the ordinary dramatic. Because the ultra-dramatic is more a pattern of emotion,
spirituality, and abstraction, it attracts the qualities of music. Twice in the “Development of Shakespeare” lectures, Eliot refers to the “hidden music”61 that hovers over the ordinary drama and the scene itself. This hidden music occurs specifically in “poetic drama, [in which] we are lifted to another plane of reality, or a hidden and mysterious pattern of reality appears as from a palimpsest,” a pattern that is musical, not dramatic.62 While in other places Eliot will emphasize the literal musicality of rhythm and meter in poetry,63 he is more
interested in it here as an abstract way of ordering and exploring intangible regions of emotion and even spirituality. This is to say that Eliot correlates the non-literal ‘musical pattern’ with a plane of reality over and beyond the world of the drama, and consequently beyond the world of ordinary life of the poet and audience.
While much of the discussion of musical pattern plays out in lectures and essays on drama and narrative, Eliot clearly subordinates musicality to poetic drama, which means that musicality is primarily an aspect or quality of poetry. While in other places he notes that not all poetry is musical, it seems clear that musicality in linguistic arts is due to language’s poetic qualities. It is also significant that while doubleness is an important part of Eliot’s criticism of drama, he does not limit it to drama. The arguments he sets forth for ‘poetic’ drama and musical pattern extend to poetry as a form. The phrase ‘poetic’ is not only a qualifier, but also an aesthetic form compatible with double worlds:
61Ibid., 544, 553.
62Ibid., 538.
But “the greatest poetry,” like the greatest prose, has a doubleness; the poet is talking to you on two planes at once. So I mean not merely that Shakespeare had as refined a sense for words as Dante; but that he also has this doubleness of speech.64
As I explain in my definition of the modernist epiphany, Eliot uses stage plays both to reach beyond and to connect with the audience through familiarity and ordinariness:
characters “must have a direct contact with us at the starting point of their emotions, and the situations from which these emotions arise must be comprehensible to us in terms of ordinary daily living.”65 The same principle is especially applicable to language: “Only the poet who can say the common things, as common men would say them in daily speech, can say the greatest things.”66 At first, the world of the drama should be indistinguishable from the “hidden music” of the beyond; the musical and the dramatic “are not the same, although up to a point they develop together.”67 The musical pattern thus corresponds to poetic drama, whereas ordinariness and the internal world of the drama correspond to the plain drama. Language specifically lifts the audience to a “higher plane,”68 and even in scenes exhibiting a particularly musical pattern, Shakespeare uses noticeably colloquial speech.69
Eliot is aware of the limits of language; in 1936, he writes in The Listener:
64T. S. Eliot, “Introduction to The Wheel of Fire: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sombre Tragediesby G. Wilson Knight,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: English Lion, 1930–1933, ed. Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 147.
65Eliot, “Development,” 537. 66Ibid., 553.
But underneath the action, which should be perfectly intelligible, there should be a musical pattern which intensifies our excitement by reinforcing it with feeling from a deeper and less articulate level. Everybody knows that there are things that can be said in music that cannot be said in speech. And there are things that can be said in poetic drama that cannot be said in either music or ordinary speech.70
In the same essay he argues that poetry is the “natural and complete medium” for drama. Implicit in Eliot’s essay is the concept that poetry follows a musical pattern, whereas prose genres follow a non-poetic, single-world dramatic pattern. Though creating a structural distinction between form and content, Eliot holds that because poetry can follow a musical pattern, it is able to express emotion. This is nothing new, as scholars are well aware of Eliot’s early concern for emotion in his theory of the objective correlative:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding and “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.71
Thus far, critics have not linked Eliot’s objective correlative to musical pattern. What he describes in 1919 as the “set of objects, a situation, a chain of events,” I think we should recognize as a pattern that effectively and accurately captures and prompts an emotional response from the audience. Such composition is by nature musical, not dramatic, and pertains to intangible experience, ineffable meaning, and significance beyond the immediate events and characters in a given situation. In “Development of Shakespeare,” Eliot revisits
70T. S. Eliot, “The Need for Poetic Drama,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The
Critical Edition: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934−1939, ed. Iman Javadi, Schuchard Ronald, and Jayme Stayer, vol. 5, The Listener (1936) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 403.
71T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: The
“Hamlet and His Problems,” but he emends his early dissatisfaction to claim that “from
Hamlet—there appears dimly another plane of emotion, apprehensible through the music of the play… so that the people in the play have at least a double existence.”72 Eliot’s early dissatisfaction with Hamlet is its formal inability to capture inexpressible emotion: “the complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in
Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in
excess of the fact as they appear.”73 The facts that are so problematic are the substance of dramatic patterning, and the play lacks what Eliot would come to identify as a “musical pattern which intensifies our excitement by reinforcing it with feeling from a deeper and less articulate level.”74
Eliot’s association of musical pattern with emotion is more clearly stated in 1937, in his introduction to Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. He notes that “Miss Barnes's prose has the prose rhythm that is prose style, and the musical pattern which is not that of verse.”75 He gives a glowing commendation ofcharacter and event development in the novel, but he reserves special praise for the emotional component of the novel:
The book is not simply a collection of individual portraits; the characters are all knotted together, as people are in real life, by what we may call chance or destiny, rather than by deliberate choice of each other's company: it is the whole pattern that they form, rather than any individual constituent, that is the focus of interest.76
72Eliot, “Development,” 550-551. 73Eliot, “Hamlet,” 125.
74Eliot, “Need for Poetic Drama,” 403.
75T. S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes, “Introduction,” in Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1961), xii.
