"The Possibility of a Poetic Drama"-T.S. Eliot

When I was reading through T.S. Eliot's "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama" (online, at whatthethundersaid.org, thanks to the wonder of technology) I was struck by the following line: "the moment an idea has been transferred from its pure state in order that it may become comprehensible to the inferior intelligence it has lost contact with art."

My first thought was of my high school chorus teacher, who always told us that it wasn't his job to come down to our level, it was our job to come up to his, handing us a dictionary when we wanted to know the meaning of whatever 25 cent word he had used that day. Of course this thought is rather frivolous, and nostalgically indulgent, as most of my "first thoughts" tend to be as I read.

My second thought is that the line reminded me of another passage we had read for class. It took me awhile to figure out what the connection was, but in looking back through the mess of highlights and scribbles, I found this passage in Emerson's "The Poet":

"For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem."

Although Eliot was speaking more of the dumbing down of ideas for the masses, I cannot help but associate the "art" he spoke of with the eternal truth that Emerson and others were attempting to write down. In my mind we (humans) are quite simply the "inferior intelligence," and in our attempts to render truth comprehensible we separate it from the eternal art and, as always happens when we are trying to summarize a concept we do not fully understand, "substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem."