The Obscure Poet

Extract

When Oliver Goldsmith wrote The Deserted Village he made it perfectly clear, both by his title and the content of his poem, what he was intending to say. A great poet of to-day, Mr. T. S. Eliot, in writing East Coker and Burnt Norton, has not been so explicit either in his title or in his contents; few of his readers know Mr. Eliot well enough to realise the significance of these place-names in his own personal history; nor will they find it easy to elucidate all the references within the poems. The title of the third of the trilogy, The Dry Salvages, has been explained by a footnote, though there too the text is not easy to follow.

Recently an attempt has been made to justify the obscurity of modern poetry, and especially Mr. Eliot’s poetry, by maintaining that great poetry in all ages has been obscure, that it is only written for ‘competent’ readers and it not ‘a mere pastime for the idle.’ This is simply not true. Much of the great poetry of the past has been exquisite in its lucidity; many, perhaps, of the references are more obscure to us than they were to contemporaries; but the main themes of the great poems are as plain as their titles, an Ode on a Grecian Urn; Paradise Lost. These poems have formed in all civilized ages one of the very highest recreations to be enjoyed in human leisure; to deny that they are ‘a mere pastime for the idle’ is to misstate the problem. You do not earn your bread by reading poetry, and it can call for more intellectual effort than a detective story without rivalling a Torquemada cross-word puzzle.