From Mermaid Song to Tongues of Fire: Eliot's Consistent Desire for Pure Poetic Speech from Prufrock to Four Quartets

This paper examines the consistent presence in T.S. Eliot’s poetry— from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to Four Quartets— of a desire to locate (first, to hear, and finally, to speak) the language of what might be called pure poetry. Eliot, desiring to leave behind the prosaic speech of ‘the women who come and go talking of Michelangelo’, appears to place all his hope for meaningful utterance in the song—in the music— of the mermaids. What is more, he appears to locate this language—the song of pure poetry— exclusively in the domain of the transcendent. In Four Quartets he says there are things only the dead ‘can tell you’; their language ‘is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living’. They, like the mythic mermaids, speak the eternal language of pure poetry— the language which Eliot endeavours to speak as a native, even as he acknowledges where his words ‘crack and sometimes break’. This paper will explore Eliot’s pursuit of this pure speech in relationship to the theology of the via negativa.