Great Artist, Bad Influence
Perhaps the most notorious essay in this collection is that one suggests that there lies a great irony in the great English poet John Milton being technically brilliant and influential. As Eliot notes, “a man may be a great artist and yet have a bad influence.” His argument is the very definition: Milton was the best at what he did and therefore entire generations of poets following in his path suffered by trying to emulate something they had no chance of replicating rather than finding their own voice.
Hamlet
“The Mona Lisa of Literature” also suffers from the irony of the irresolvable paradox. Hamlet can never be fully appreciated because the audience “should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not himself understand.”
The Immaturity of the Precocious
Eliot makes fine use of metaphor when he writes that “The precocious child is often, in some obvious ways, childish for his age in comparison with ordinary children.” It is a brilliant distillation of an inescapable irony of the arts; that which is ahead of its time can often be viewed as hopelessly beyond hope for maturation in the moment.
“Never, never, never, never, never!”
Eliot identifies this quote from Shakespeare’s King Lear as one of the most “thrilling” in the entire tragedy before underlining the self-acknowledged irony of his assertion: “apart from knowledge of the context, how can you say that it is poetry, or even competent verse?”
Yeats
Eliot reserves his most gracious sense of irony for William Butler Yeats. Recognizing that poet’s 1903 collection In the Seven Woods as the major turning point of his career, he maintains that “in beginning to speak as a particular man he is beginning to speak for man.” The irony is that only after turning inward did Yeats finally succeed in becoming a poet speaking for the universal experience of man.
