Nur Wer die Sehnsucht Kennt (Lyricism in Works of Poet T.S. Eliot‪)‬

The article examines the nature of Eliot's lyricism, having first suggested that all lyricism is "an expression of desire, a reaching out for an unattainable fulfilment." It takes note of the fact that although Eliot has written lyric lines of incomparable beauty, he did not produce a body of lyric poems. His lyricism seems to break out, as though stifled, rather than to constitute the raison d'etre of his work. The article relates this to the belief expressed by Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that the poet escapes from rather than "expresses" his own personality, which, in turn, would seem to reflect two ideas of Bradley: the first being that all reality is experience and all experience one, and the second that experience is of three orders, immediate, relational, and transcendent. Although much of Eliot's poetry reflects "relational experience," a nostalgia for "immediacy of experience" permeates Eliot's work. If we examine his lyric imagery, we find reference almost always to his early life, to a past that he has left behind. The poet's "first world" creates his "rose garden," the immediate experience to which he turns and returns. It was only during his last years with his marriage to Valerie, that his abiding loneliness, his hunger for the lost simplicity of his early life, was seemingly assuaged by a happiness akin to that "immediate experience." The effect upon his verse was of dubious merit. **********