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“Natural Evolution” in “Dramatic Essences” from Robert Browning to T. S. Eliot
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
A consciously modern critic, in a review of 14 May 1920 in the Athenaeum, recommended that for the twentieth century poet “the natural evolution would be to proceed in the direction indicated by Browning; to distil the dramatic essences, if we can, and infuse them into some other liquor.” Since, in this critic's eyes, Browning “invented the dramatic monologue,” a form responsive to the demands of the English dramatic tradition, Browning's poetry was taken as indicating a direction which modern poets should follow. And, later in the review, the critic implied that Browning's work on “a kind of dramatic form” prepared the reading public to respond to the works of the dramatic poets who follow – himself included. The critic was T. S. Eliot.
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References
NOTES
1. Eliot, T. S., “The Poetic Drama,” Athenaeum, No. 4698 (14 05 1920), p. 635.Google Scholar
2. Eliot, T. S., “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (1932; rpt. London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 31–32.Google Scholar
3. See Eliot's, Selected Essays, p. 304Google Scholar. See also Eliot, T. S., “The Lesson of Baudelaire,” Tyro, 1 (Spring, 1921), 4Google Scholar. For a detailed treatment of the relationship between Eliot and Browning as it develops in Eliot's prose from 1916 to 1953, see my article “‘Another Pattern’: T. S. Eliot's Relationship to Robert Browning” to appear in Studies in Browning and His Circle, 10, No. 2 (Fall, 1982).Google Scholar
4. Pound writes: “Mr. Eliot's work interests me more than that of any other poet now writing in English. The most interesting poems in Victorian English are Browning's Men and Women, or, if that statement is too absolute, let me contend that the form of these poems is the most vital form of that period of English.… Since Browning there have been very few good poems of this sort. Mr. Eliot has made two notable additions to the list.” Reprinted in Pound, Ezra, “T. S. Eliot,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. Eliot, T. S. (New York: New Directions, 1968), pp. 419–20.Google Scholar
5. Browning, Robert, “Preface”Google Scholar to Sordello, in the Complete Poetical Works of Browning, ed. Scudder, Horace E. (Cambridge Edition, 1890; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, n.d.), p. 74.Google Scholar
6. See for example: Beckson, Karl and Munro, John, “Symons, Browning and the Development of the Modern Aesthetic,” SEL, 10 (1970), 687–99Google Scholar; Flowers, Betty S., Browning and the Modern Tradition (Toronto: Macmillan, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gridley, Roy, “Browning Among the Modern Poets,” Browning (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 165–79Google Scholar; Jones, A. R., “Robert Browning and the Dramatic Monologue: The Impersonal Art,” Critical Quarterly, 9 (1967), 301–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stange, G. Robert, “Browning and Modern Poetry,” in Browning's Mind and Art, ed. Tracy, C. (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1968), pp. 184–97.Google Scholar
7. See for example: Christ, Carol T., “T. S. Eliot and the Victorians,” Modern Philology, 79, No. 2 (11, 1981), 157–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who argues that Eliot learned his use of dramatic monologue from Tennyson, not Browning; Gardner, Helen, “T. S. Eliot and the English Poetic Tradition,” Byron Foundation Lecture (The University of Nottingham: n.p., 1965).Google Scholar
8. Eliot, T. S., Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963)Google Scholar. All further references to Eliot's poetry come from this edition.
9. Browning, Robert, The Works of Robert Browning, intro. Kenyon, F. G., Centenary Edition, 10 vols. (1912; rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966)Google Scholar. All further references to Browning's work are from this edition, and line references will appear in parentheses after the quotation.
10. The young man begins “Portrait of a Lady” with an imperative, “We have been, let us say.” He, like Prufrock, is timid and uncommitted and voices his mental wanderings in the subjunctive “And should I have the right to smile.” “La Figlia” follows the same progression in verb tense and mood from imperative through past and past perfect subjunctive (“So I would have him leave,” “I should find”) to simple past and present. Eliot's striking and frequent use of the subjunctive disappears after his first volume of poetry.
11. Bloom, Harold, “Browning: Good Moments and Ruined Quests,” in Poetry and Repression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 182.Google Scholar
12. Bloom, Harold, “Browning's ‘Childe Roland’: All Things Deformed and Broken,” in The Ringers in the Tower (1971; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 157–69Google Scholar; Bloom, , “Testing the Map: Browning's ‘Childe Roland,’” in A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 106–25.Google Scholar
13. Shaw, David, The Dialectical Temper (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 94.Google Scholar
14. The Complete Poetical Works of Browning, p. 12.Google Scholar
15. Eliot uses dots to indicate structural division, for example, in “Prufrock” and “A Cooking Egg.” The dots in “A Cooking Egg” separate introductory scene from the speaker's reactions to this scene, and these thoughts from a summarizing judgment on the state of the modern world.
16. See Eliot's Captain Horsfall, an American gentleman, in Sweeney Agonistes. Others of Browning's names seem to have stuck in Eliot's mind as well. Gardner, in “T. S. Eliot and the English Poetic Tradition,” p. 20Google Scholar, discusses the derivation of Monchensey, Violet and Ivy in The Family Reunion from Browning's epigraph to Colombe's Birthday. Pipit may derive from Pippa.
17. I borrow this phrase from T. J. Collins. See “The Poetry of Robert Browning: A Proposal for Re-examination,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 15 (Summer 1973), 338–39.Google Scholar