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But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things” (paragraph 17). Of course! In 1944 Williams called this sort of prose “an affectation of authority, an offensive leaking from above” (Se­ lected Letters 225). 14. T. S. 11 (De­cem­ber 1917): 167. 15. ) 16. T. S. Eliot, “Whether Rostand Had Something about Him,” Athenaeum 4656 (25 July 1919): 665. ” Such paradoxical phrasing is, I believe, a mark of Eliot’s willingness to make concessions to his reader.

17 Eliot’s rhetorical strategies reflect his assumptions, and so the prose exhibits a fondness for rhetorical pairs, for periodic and for balanced sentences, for an air of objectivity and poise. Distinguishing between creative genius and a criti­cal genius (paragraph 2), between his­tori­cal and aesthetic criticism (paragraph 4), he embraces a taxonomic method which helps to establish a reassuring sense of stability and order while at the same time his evolutionary model of literary history implies not only that current writing must not repeat the past but that the poet has a duty to improve upon it.

Eliot moves this into quite a complicated little movement when, later in the essay, he refers to specific passages and episodes of the Divina Commedia (paragraph 14), or quotes Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy without identifying it (paragraph 16). There he resorts to a species of intimi­dation (excluding the reader from the club)—­or of flattery (confirmation of club membership)—­by challenging his reader’s erudition. He has already cleared the way for this strategy when he assures the reader that “I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly a part of my programme for the métier of poetry.