A Bit of Confirmation from an Expert

05 Apr, 2026

Maybe it’s inevitable, when you read a lot of poetry criticism, to come across discussions of T. S. Eliot somewhere in the mix. And Hugh Kenner’s and Guy Davenport’s delicious expositions to the contrary, I still can’t for the life of me understand why the guy remains such a towering poet—unless, of course, readers appreciate his obscurities as a means of proving their own intellectual or cultural superiority over loosey-goosey hoi polloi and their embrace of, say, William Stafford or Rupi Kaur.¹

Be that as it may, I felt a weight lift off the ol’ shoulders this morning while reading Michael Hamburger’s fantastic The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the 1960s. His section on Eliot confirmed I’ve not been a complete hayseed in finding the poet’s work cold and purposefully inaccessible to messy human beings unable to get through the world without honoring both mental and emotional capacities, much less confiding in other messy human beings about emotion-laden troubles and joys. As part of a larger conversation on the identification, or not, of the poet with the person said poet is when not being a poet, Hamburger goes into Eliot’s donning in life and in his poetry an impersonal mask that “worked because it was not a literary or aesthetic doctrine, but a personal need. Renunciation and self-denial,” Hamburger says, “pervaded his work long before he found a religious justification for them.”²

It wasn’t just that Eliot frowned upon poetry focused on the unique travails of a unique individual, even before the confessional poets blasted onto the scene at mid-century. Hamburger notes that “What was embarrassing to Eliot was that he had an individual personality susceptible to sufferings that were not shared by others, that were not even comprehensible to others, because they enjoyed and approved the things he abhorred.” That sense of alienation, Hamburger notes, was hardly unique among prior “generations of poets.” But for Eliot, it was intolerable, for one thing, because that outsider-y sense reeked of mewling Romanticism; for another, he “wanted a classical coherence of the individual with [Christian] society,” a desire that drove him to relocate to an England he hoped (wrongly) would be different from the vulgar commercialism of the United States. Even there, though, there never was (and still isn’t) such a thing as a Christian society, and the only way such a thing could come about was by doing away with “the individual personality… because it was tainted with heterodoxy and multiplicity.”³ In producing his work, then, for Eliot it seems that a great poet will essentially purge himself of everything that makes him a feeling human.

It was Hamburger’s quotation, though, of a passage of Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that hammered home how terrifying such an undertaking sounds, and how far the poet’s aim of depersonalization went. “Poetry,” he said there, “is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from those things."⁴

We could haggle about how much wiggle room that “of course” and what follows it allows. But it wasn’t just a matter for Eliot of taking the uncertainties and embarrassments, discomforts and pain involved in being the “personality” you were and sublimating them into something readers could identify with, or at least appreciate, as belonging to the wider world. It was a matter of escaping all those things altogether, of wanting from the get-go and in general to get away from them. An all-encompassing and more disciplinarian version of a tear-filled (and even untrue in the moment) declaration that “I wish it would all go away,” or the driving force behind the grief-stricken patients of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, thinking life will be easier if they just wipe from memory that which unsettles them. But even in those couple of examples, the desire to escape is from the aftermath of a particular botched or unfortunate situation—not from emotion and personality tout court.

It’s understandable that Eliot wanted nothing to do with navel-gazing drivel; I could relate it to the contemporary frustration of coming across employee surveys in which respondents assert they just want to be “celebrated” at work “for who they are.” (In that latter case, my rejoinder would be that you could celebrate me not via empty effusions regarding my “diversity dimensions,” but via real healthcare, a bullshit-free work environment that does not demand useless hours of butt in seat and de facto never being off the clock, and letting me do my job without requiring my private life bleed into or be sacrificed to it). But it didn’t seem enough to Eliot to approach poetry and poetic creation differently from one particular, historically situated “school;” according to Hamburger, he seemed to want to turn poetry, and through it, all of worthwhile life, into ascetic existence, one that “demanded sacrifice not only of self-love, but of love and sympathy for all the grosser manifestations of humanity.”⁵ The sort of feeling I’ve gotten from reading Eliot does indeed make it seem like his work and his demands go beyond the decreation of self described not only by Simone Weil, eager as she was to lose herself in God’s love, but also and especially by all those medieval mystics who, even in hoping to empty themselves so God could enter, were super-sensual, often outright erotic, in their imaginings of what that might entail. As Simon Critchley said of them and of mysticism in general, the surrender of self involved was all “about the possibility of ecstatic life.”⁶ For Eliot, I get the sense that ecstasy, or anything related to it, would have been distasteful—embarrassing.

Critchley does include Eliot in his discussion of mysticism—and although he doesn’t place the poet in the club of mystics, he seems much more sympathetic to him, is better able than I to find a breathing shred of humanity in him. Whereas I (and it seems Hamburger) see an off-putting snob, Critchley looks on the poet as someone in search of “a stillness…. a condition which is closer to music.”⁷ And after all, Eliot, who probably would’ve been driven batty by Simone Weil’s theatricality and, well, feeling, wrote a pretty admiring, if well-balanced, preface to her The Need for Roots. All the same, I get a chill when reading the entirety of the essay Hamburger quoted from. Even as Eliot makes a good argument there for why we can’t just trash tradition, and why tradition must and does grow and change as the present uses and contributes to it, there’s always his insistence on “The progress of an artist” as “a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality,” which he illustrates by describing how sulphurous acid results from placing “a bit of finely filiated platinum... into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.” The platinum, which represents the depersonalized artist, sticks around, and there’s none of it contained in the brand-new substance (the poem). Well that’s all fine and dandy, but that new substance is corrosive (even if less so than sulfuric acid). Eliot’s kind of poet might be “separat[ing]… the man who suffers and the mind which creates,” but whatever that mind is creating might best be kept at a good distance. He talks in the essay about “the enjoyment of poetry,” but when he wraps up his treatise on poetry as escape from emotion by asserting that he’s really just providing “practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry,” you wonder what enjoyment could even mean under these circumstances.⁸ How is one responsibly interested in poetry, for example? That sounds about as fun—or meaningless—as insisting to phone-addicted sixth graders that they will love Lucretius, because you’ve told them they must love Lucretius.

I’m not finished with Hamburger’s book, and I hope my lack of “objectivity” hasn’t preemptively tainted his arguments for anyone who has yet to read him. I also want to note that Hamburger’s not condemning Eliot’s work, nor is he failing to note the changes and developments that work underwent. Finally, I’ll grant that Eliot (or many a real critic) wouldn’t even take the time to sneer at my not-informed-enough position. But boy, did it feel grand to have one of those real critics back up the mere feeling-and-emotion-laden response I’ve always had to the work of a literary giant.

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