Rimbaud's Influence in the 21st Century

Reflections on My Changing Opinion and Attitude Towards a Brilliantly Precocious 19th Century French Poet

by James Albert Barr

"The body of the poet
  The thought was long.
  The flowers were here and now they're gone...
  Where are we now with this life we are imitating?
  The poet is the killer... and that... we are now betraying."
            - The Murder Poet by Chris Barr from his 2024 poetry collection, Hauntological Echoes 

I haven’t read Henry Miller's “The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud'' in several years. It’s been really great to pick it up again and reacquaint myself with Miller’s rhapsodic, thoroughly engrossing, if characteristically, defiantly immature, prose, whatever the seeming eschatological implications therein. I consider it one of the “books of my life” (to quote another Miller book title, and sentiment, in general), but, admittedly, a book predominantly a product – but a highly valued product nonetheless! – of my relative youth; relative, meaning my late 20s and early 30s. I was 27 years old when I first read it at the reference library at the corner of Yonge and Bloor, in Toronto, back in the summer of 1995. If memory serves, I think my brother Jeff eventually bought a precious copy of it for me for Christmas in 1997, and I’ve had it in my possession ever since. In conjunction with my rereading of Miller’s personal celebration of the life and work of 19th century French poet, Arthur Rimbaud (and its connection with his own life), I also dusted off my well-worn copy of Rimbaud’s complete works (the Paul Schmidt translation) and read many of the poems contained inside, poems that I had read over and over since I first procured that copy back in 1994 and all through the rest of that final decade of the 20th century. Rimbaud was absolutely unsurpassed in my eyes, mind and heart back then when it came to comparing him with other poets. But a “sea change” had taken place in my constitution around, or shortly after, the turn of the millennium, in terms of how I perceived Rimbaud as compared to other poets, namely T.S. Eliot and Stephane Mallarme, and to a lesser degree even Rainer Maria Rilke (who, in fact, was nearly on the same level as Rimbaud during the 90s, in my estimation).  To this day, however, those four master poets still gloriously represent my own personal “Mount Rushmore of poetry”, with a second-tier of great poets in my life being: Valery, Keats, Yeats and Baudelaire. Shakespeare, of course, is obviously monumental for me as well, but I mostly associate him as a dramatist, though he was, unquestionably, an incredible poet, in the strictest sense, too. Still, it’s his “Hamlet” that sticks out most conspicuously and nearly exclusively, in terms of works that have profoundly altered me in some magical way; although there’s also “Macbeth” to consider, as it was my first Shakespeare play I ever read, but still. Getting back to Rimbaud, whom I hadn’t been nearly as preoccupied with over the last couple of decades as I was in the 90s, I realize why he is no longer “my poet”, and hasn’t been for awhile: his immaturity and adolescent-driven, unrealistic, if understandable in his context, demands of society and life, in general. Rimbaud is truly the “poet of youth” and inexperience (at least in the outset of his poetic journey), despite his claim to the contrary. He was verily a young, precociously brilliant Young Turk of a poet who insatiably hungered for the endless and inexhaustible banquet of life and experience “where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed”. He wanted, nay demanded, the secrets of life and the universe, his appetite knew no bounds or restraints. He was truly the “enfant terrible” and the damned voyou, “the great criminal, the great accursed – and the Supreme Scientist!”, or so that was the adolescently-inspired plan anyway. Through his prescribed “derangement of all the senses” he chased after drunken visions beheld in boundless and hitherto unseen realms (“I’ve seen what others have only dreamed they saw!”) in order to ultimately attain the “unknown”, and perhaps “forbidden knowledge”, but at a great personal cost, both mentally and emotionally, and even physically. The result was some of the greatest and feverishly unrestrained poetry ever written, and an inauguration of the truly modern and symbolist, as well as being a precursor to 20th century surrealism, and an inspiration for the modernists. Rimbaud’s accomplishments are still deserving of a great sense of awe and admiration, no doubt. At their best they still provide a system for unbridled experimenting and Dionysian expression for the young and hungry in life, basically for the impetuosity and impatience so traditionally prevalent in youth, but at their worst they represent a completely unbalanced and undisciplined, even implacable, and certainly dangerous (but that’s what makes it so attractive and tempting, right?), program of potential self-destruction and inevitable disappointment, for after all, didn’t Rimbaud ultimately fail in his Faustian quest for knowledge and experience to achieve what he set out to attempt? And, yes, as he mentions in his famous “Seer letters” of May 1871, if by this so-called “systematized” engagement of the “derangement of all the senses…he attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnamable: other horrible workers will come, they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!” Spoken like a true exponent of unbridled and irrational youth, though a fantastically exceptional one, of course. All youths, even the unassuming and shy ones, have egocentric inner flights of grandiosity and outlandish wishes and desires. It’s quite normal, but Rimbaud took them to places hitherto unheard of for a youth of his gifted and precocious persuasion back in the late 19th century, when God was losing his grip on his alleged creation, and Nietzsche was soon to proclaim that “God is dead!” via Zarathustra, and that the demythologization of history’s, or certainly Western man’s, ages-old systems of belief were crumbling and modern man was hitting his stride scientifically and materially, as he became more and more an ardent adherent of the capitalist system and free-enterprise; the once predominate internal life was abandoned for an external one, which, ironically shunned nature for artificial material goods and property, as did the former  in the name of God’s will, the saved soul, and world-transcending grace and salvation. The thing is, not nearly enough of the new generational “horrible workers” that followed were of the intellectual and artistic brilliance that Rimbaud was, and the tragic results were likely many, I’m sure, as Rimbaud’s work became much more read and known in the 20th century, particularly with the young, and restless… and reckless. The one that comes to mind immediately, of course, is the tragic case of River Phoenix, who, when he discovered Rimbaud, through his reading of Miller’s “The Time of the Assassins” (in initial preparation for his unrealized role as Rimbaud in what eventually became 1995’s “Total Eclipse” film, eventually starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud, in River's stead), was so enthralled by Rimbaud (and probably Miller’s very effective and provocative prose no less) that he, himself, decided to initiate his own “derangement of all the senses”, and got himself killed, at only age 23, because of it, I don’t doubt one little bit. I could also name Jim Morrison among those tragic “horrible workers” who were so thirsty for visions and cultural-revolution too, whatever the ill-advised measures taken for their own sake. And he was only 27 when he died!

What Phoenix and Morrison both failed to realize (and I think even to a certain, ironic degree Henry Miller himself, at least in his, still, youth-inspired and romantic idealism at age 55 when he wrote his “Rimbaud book”, and inspired many more youths besides Phoenix), before it was too late for them, was that Rimbaud had abandoned his poetic mission when he was just 20 years old! After he finally realized the futility of his goal (which was chronicled in his celebrated, but grossly misunderstood “A Season in Hell”); that he could NOT, in fact, break into heaven through the back-door, and bestow, wholesale, the grand, magnificent visions of his drunken, phantasmagoric voyages before all of humanity (because, after all, it was all or nothing with Rimbaud!). He rejected literature and retreated, out of necessity, from society completely, by ensconcing himself in the jungles, rivers and deserts of Africa, sojourning in Abyssinia and Harar, for instance, before the arduous, physical demands on himself resulted in his losing a leg to cancer and shortly thereafter, at age 37 in 1891, dying in abject agony while in the apparent midst of feverish visions returning from his youth as a poet, while his sister Isabelle tried to get him to repent and accept God in order to “save his soul”.

What, in the end, is the ultimate lesson learned here through one’s reading of not only Rimbaud’s poetry, but biography as well? I feel that it’s a lesson infused as a “cautionary tale” of what NOT to do lest one put his/her life in potential peril, and not just mortally, but perhaps more immediately, mentally and emotionally, even spiritually, without any direct connection with religion, that is. It’s also crucially important to obtain a “historical context” of the age that produced the likes of a Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Wagner, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Zola, Whitman, Emerson, Manet, Van Gogh, Darwin, Blavatsky, Strindberg, Ibsen, Beardsley, Tesla and, of course, Mallarme. This is what I gradually did over the last 20 years or so, and it has ultimately rewarded me with a vaster understanding of these great historical figures and their respective times and contributions to humanity. Coupled with these heroic 19th century examples and the ones I discovered and absorbed from the 20th century, I feel I’ve been able to, for the most part, achieve a “constitutional balance” of the Apollonian and the Dionysian tendencies of the artist and thinker. Through my myriad readings of poets and philosophers, not only through the 19th and 20th centuries, but basically through over two thousand years worth of great artists’ and thinkers’ work, I’ve applied my investigational system I call the “4 C’s Approach” and thus have “collected and connected, calculated and corrected” to the best of my abilities, leading me up to the present point of my own personal journey of attaining knowledge and expressing myself artistically, a fairly broad and well-scoped understanding of the world-view via Western history, predominantly, as well as that of the Orient, though I have still much to learn. All this despite Oswald Spengler’s conclusion (made about a hundred years ago now and counting) that the West is in decline, and that modern life is merely a Faustian Civilization, as opposed to an Apollonian Culture, which means that all the arts have been exhausted (painting, for instance, peaked in the 17th century!), religion has been superseded (to the, apparent, detriment of our world, for better or worse), and we are now purgatorial wanderers/zombies of the money-system and the "cult of the science". According to Spengler, there’s nothing a person like me, and my ilk, could possibly do to prevent this inevitable and unavoidable decline. The implication in Spengler’s amazingly rich and informative, if dour, book is that we contemporary beings are, for the most part, if even subtly, aware of this inevitability, but we stubbornly forge onward hoping for a “stay of execution” kind of panacea, or rather placebo even. I mean, what the hell else are we going to do, besides bury ourselves in mindless, and effectively distracting, activities like cyber-spatial/gaming/social media immersion, celebrity obsession, needless shopping (on-line or otherwise), fashion following, identity politics, hedonism, etc, like the majority of people appear to be helplessly mired in? All I can say for now is “stay tuned”, ironically enough, and see what happens.

The Plight of the Millennial Poet

 

A Look Back at an Early Essay on the Crisis in Contemporary Poetry 

by James Albert Barr

The following essay was written by me 25 years ago in anticipation of the impending millennium that would bring us all into the 21st century, Y2K anxiety be damned (lol). I was a, still, learning, young writer and poet with two humble chapbooks of poetry under my proverbial belt: Scorched Ink (1995) and Owls on the Roof (1997). My third collection, Such Late Fugitives, would take me twenty years to compose and finally get published in 2020. The patience-challenging hard work that went into my most recent collection paid off, thankfully, because I'm quite proud of Such Late Fugitives, and believe it to be, by far, my best work to date.

Its official composition began less than two weeks before I wrote a September 7th, 1999 journal entry that would eventually become my first post-education essay. In 2000, this essay would be included in an independently published anthology, through Burning Effigy Press, of Toronto, Ontario-based writers and poets titled, Voices Under the Guise of Darkness. Looking back at this essay, I must freely admit that, given what has transpired, not only in the poetry community, generally speaking, but in our culture and society, en masse, I did perhaps betray an ever-so-slight degree of naivety, here and there, despite my sobering conclusion expressed therein. I'd like to think my heart, and aspirations for poetry, were always in the right place, regardless.  :-)   

-----------------


There's a persisting dilemma afflicting the contemporary poet. It's called communication. That is, to effectively and undeniably reach the reader and/or listener successfully through one's written and, although not necessarily, recited works. How can the contemporary poet achieve laudable standards of creativity and originality, without compromise, and still move the hearts and minds of even the least familiar with poetry? The less than facile answer is to reconcile, to balance out the "comprehensive gauge" of language, while still conveying even the most profound aspects of life, of existence, using these rough, unrefined, contextual, manipulative "tools" we refer to as words. The great Structuralist linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, called them "signifiers".

Language, essentially, determines our world; how we engage it; how we interpret it; how we represent it, and perhaps most unsettlingly, however seemingly ineluctable it may be, how we believe it and operate it. These implications of the first magnitude face the conscious poet, trying valiantly to converge with people, while struggling within the rigidly divergent and corporately exploited language system pumping out "meaning and value" to a predominantly unwitting public of bewitched consumers.

Henry Miller once said in his indispensable book, The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud, that the poet has lost his/her audience - that being the masses. He said, "to be a poet was once the highest calling, today it is the most futile one." Miller asserted that in 1946! Today (1999) it seems more futile than ever to be a poet; a true poet who is still in tune with the world, however harsh and grim, and attempting to transmit the realities of existence, and life in general, to the "bewildered herd"!

Miller continues, "It is not so because the world is immune to the poet's beseeching, but because the poet himself no longer believes in his divine mission." First of all, at least in today's conveniently complex world, the estranged, average citizen appears to be quite immune to the unconventional poet's attempts to communicate. This is ignorance with impunity! The machine, the perverse economic system basically controlling society, rewards people, directly and indirectly, for their ignorance, and, in essence, dissuades the masses from poetry because they want them to remain passive, ineffectual, and most importantly, consumers! Commercial society depends on the neurosis, fear, guilt, inadequacy, self-alienation, etc, etc, of others, in order to flourish and expand seemingly endlessly! Poetry represents a distraction and even threat to the capitalistic protocol. 

Now arriving at this daunting conclusion, you're goddamn right it's hard to sustain belief in the so-called "divine mission" of the poet! They - the populace - are immune to us, but we are not immune to them! Despite the improbability of ever getting through to them, I can't help but forge onward because I'm too aware of things! too conscious and conscientious to give up my "calling", however presumptuous and pretentious that may sound. I must persist, in spite of the apparent insurmountable state of society, because I feel so strongly, so ultra-sensitively!

Referring to the hapless poet, Miller claims, "He has been singing off key for a century or more; at least we can no longer tune in. The screech of the bomb [nowadays the television, computer, and other technological media - my aside] still makes sense to us, but the ravings of the poet seem like gibberish. And it is gibberish, if out of 2 billion [now over 7 billion!] people who make up the world, only a few thousand pretend to understand what the individual poet is saying. The cult of art reaches its end when it exists only for a precious handful of men and women. then it is no longer art but the cipher language of a secret society for the propagation of meaningless individuality."

Actually, poetry is a cult, at least in the parlance of our time. Much like the status of films such as: Blue Velvet, Henry and June, Gummo, Naked, Withnail and I, Pink Flamingos, etc, and their creators, films that did very little at the box-office, but developed a small cult following of admirers who appreciate originality, boldness, substance, and a total disregard for popular opinions and tastes, and who have subsequently supported the films that followed these because of the reputations of their makers, is tantamount to where poetry now stands in the much scrutinized and predominantly controlled cultural barometer. It merely has a cult following and an even smaller demographic of those who have genuine insight, appreciation and, at least, relative understanding.

In Toronto, i consider myself a minority within a minority! I can't seem to reach the people in the so-called literary scene here, let alone the general public! It's a "shite state of affairs" to say the least! This very state of things running amok blind-folded is what I ache and mull over in my ceaselessly barraged mind. I cannot resolve the world because I suspect there is nothing to resolve! This, of course, sounds suspect in of itself! And unacceptable, despite objectively and logically realizing the inevitable realities to the contrary. And the crazy thing is quite a substantial number of people would agree in some form or other! We're on the same dial but different frequency!

All palatable, romantic leanings aside, regarding the virtues of poetry, I believe I do have a mission. I'm not sure I can, with a straight, honest face, refer to it exactly as "divine", but a genuine mission nonetheless. However, contrary to the romantic, subjective and ultimately naive enthusiasm and rhapsody of Henry Miller (whom I still consider a literary hero of mine), I choose to keep things in perspective when I survey poetry's place in the world; how its benevolent flame seems to be petering out and what I have to do in order to rekindle its neglected intentions, its yearning overtures in the name of humanity, the true organic, even mystical essence of life. This is my mission, my foolish goal, my seemingly impossible attempt. Onward... 

On T.S. Eliot's Telling Essay, "Hamlet and His Problems"

Some Casual Thoughts on Why Eliot Was So Critical of Shakespeare's Famous Play 


"He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore's rocks or what you will, the sea's voice, a voice heard only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son consubstantial with the father." - James Joyce: Ulysses (the "Scylla and Caribdes" section)

by James Albert Barr

In 1919, T.S. Eliot wrote a short, but controversial, essay on Shakespeare's most celebrated play, Hamlet. Eliot titled it, "Hamlet and HIs Problems". Now, perhaps he was just being cheekily ironic or unconsciously evasive, but it's interesting that Eliot's title focuses directly on the titular character himself, and "his problems", as opposed to the play in general, because it was, after all, the play, in general, that Eliot took rather bold issue with, as he pretty much cut right to the chase in the essay's opening sentence: "Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary." 

Eliot went "so far" as to, subsequently, write: "So far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure." Eliot attributes the play's alleged "failure" to the "intractable material of the old play." The "old play" Eliot alludes to is Thomas Kyd's, The Spanish Tragedy, which was an initial version, written a couple of decades prior to Hamlet, of the basic events culled loosely from an actual historical incident. In the play, a Knight Marshal of Spain, Hieronymo, cunningly seeks revenge for the murder of his son, Horatio. And there's a German version called Ur-Hamlet too, with an uncertain authorship attached to it. Indeed, they are all based on a well-known Scandanavian story, from the early 13th century, about Amleth (Shakespeare simply moved the 'h" to the front of the name to form Hamlet), which means "mad" or "not sane" in Old Norse, who seeks to avenge his murdered father over the course of many years. Robert Eggers made an exceptional film version of this Norse legend called The Northman in 2022, starring Alexander Skarsgard, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke and Anya Taylor-Joy.  

In The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronymo's revenge is engaged more swiftly, whereas Hamlet's is far more complicated and messily executed through clumsiness and happenstance, due to his deeply perturbed state of mind. The reasons behind Hamlet's delays for revenge are far more personally profound and philosophically tangled, provoking Eliot to conclude that Shakespeare lacked an "objective correlative", and thus comes off unconvincingly and ultimately exceeded Shakespeare's ability to wholly successfully express and present in his play.

Eliot employs the word "exceeds" or "exceeded" and "excess" several times in his haunted essay, appropriately enough. Just as Hamlet's father haunts him, so I suspect, also, Eliot's father, and his own restless, malcontented spirit, was haunting Tom around the time he wrote his essay on Hamlet. The timing is interesting and, well, timely. Eliot's father died in January of 1919, nine months before Eliot's essay was published in The Athenaeum on Sept. 26, 1919, which, fittingly, happened to be on Eliot's 31st birthday.

Henry Ware Eliot died with the belief that his son, Thomas, had squandered his considerable education, and, consequently, his very life in the process. Besides the immense sense of grief Eliot must have felt over his father's death, it must have been doubly difficult to realize and accept the unreconciled conditions of his relationship with his somewhat estranged father who, according to Peter Ackroyd's description in his 1984 biography on Eliot, "...represented the American aspiration towards success, thrift and practicality which exerted so powerful an influence throughtout Eliot's life." - a "tenuous influence", it would appear.

Unfortunately, the senior Eliot died thinking his son utterly failed to attain any of the kind of success envisioned, and expected, from his father, by "wasting his time" and efforts on poetry and literature, which Henry Eliot apparently had little interest in or respect for.

It's very interesting, and suspicious, that Eliot would not make any direct reference to Hamlet's murdered father and night-wandering ghost/spirit in his short, relatively brief essay. Why? He makes several references, all with a negative connotation, I might add, towards Hamlet's mother, Gertrude - a "fallen woman" in the eyes and heart of her grieving and discombobulated son. Eliot harshly quips, "...it is just because her character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing." I sense a definitive "intractability" in Gertrude's "character" that, perhaps, was not only difficult for Hamlet to deal with, but for Eliot as well, symbolically via a psychological inversion from mother to father/father to mother, given Eliot's own unconscious state of mind, as a grieving son, at the time of writing his essay. Perhaps an "emotional stratification" of sorts at play here.

Indeed, Eliot charged previous critics of Hamlet with a glaring oversight in regards to their collective interpretations in their "ignoring what ought to be very obvious: that Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecesssors." To "stratify" is to "arrange things", or, as in the case of this poly-written play, we're talking, or rather Eliot specifically was implying the different arrangements that were artistically dealt with by Kyd, Shakespeare and so on; of effectively layering the "intractable material", which is to say, more clearly, the tough, stubborn, even perhaps obstinate and incompliant, apparent nature of the source material. 

What exactly, according to Eliot's claim, made this play's material so "intractable"? Well, in evident conjunction with J.M. Robertson's analysis of the disparate plays deriving from the same source material, Shakespeare's Hamlet, in Eliot's opinion, failed to successfully determine a motive of revenge for Hamlet out of the effect of his mother's guilt upon him. Eliot felt, in the end, that it was ultimately unconvincing, that Hamlet's "madness", which was not wholly feigned, and his character alteration being not complete enough to work structurally successful, because Shakespeare could not ultimately find and utilize an effective enough "objective correlative", the literary concept Eliot famously introduces in his essay; a concept, in fact, that had precedence in the 19th century, namely in Walter Pater's well-renowned 1873 collection of essays, The Renaissance, where, according to Louis Menand, in his 1987 study of Eliot (Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context), Pater, at least, intimates the concept 46 years before Eliot's essay. And just a few years before "Hamlet and His Problems", Richard Aldington writes: "We convey an emotion by presenting the object and circumstance of that emotion without comment.... We make the scene convey the emotion." This description appeared in The Egoist in 1914, And, apparently, John Gould Fletcher also made a preceding allusion to the objective correlative in The Little Review in 1916.

In fairness to Eliot though, I don't think he necessarily made the official claim publicly that the concept was of his making outright. It's just that because his authoritative literary power and considerable influence was so wide-spreading and firm, that it naturally became customary to directly attribute the concept of the "objective correlative" to him. It was perhaps likely because he gave it an "official name".

So, as I was saying, regarding Shakespeare's alleged failure to find an effective, suitable and convincing objective correlative, I would counter-argue (and others already have with their own impressive analyses) that: a) an "irrefragable" objective correlative can indeed be extracted from the play to convey and justify Hamlet's emotions, and perhaps more importantly, his actions, or lack of action, aptly enough, and b) that an objective correlative is in fact besides the point; that the ultimate point of the play is ineluctably and necessarily that which "exceeds" an objective correlative, by virtue of the likelihood that the play's baroque-style tone and Benjamin-cited "Trauerspiel" nature of mournfulness, hence "mourning play", expresses an epochal sense of a late 16th/early 17th century zeitgiest mired in an actual historical crisis reflected within the diegetic confines of Elsinore, and set-off by what Frank Kermode alluded to in his 1957 book, Romantic Image, and Keith Alldritt, in his 1968 book, The Making of George Orwell, more explicitly described as a "bifurcation of human consciousness", brought about, I feel in tenable fashion, by the Protestant Reformation and the cataclysmic fall-out, and many-faceted apogee, that followed over the course of about 130 years, culminating with the English Civil War of 1642-1649, which, in turn, triggered what Eliot called the "dissociation of sensibility" of the latter half of the 17th century and beyond, though he was unaware of the initial "bifurcation of consciousness" in the previous century. This is ultimately, and most pertinently, what I feel Hamlet really meant (even if he didn't know it or understand it wholly consciously, including Shakespeare himself, outside the diegetic events of his play, nor even Eliot, ironically enough) when he declared: "The time is out of joint."

But getting back to the missed "objective correlative", or at least the uncredited one, apparently Eliot was attempting to cite a "particular emotion" in Hamlet that justified and explained his actions and reactions during the course of the play, and the show of disgust and degradation towards Gertrude, his "incestuous" mother, was not ample enough to evoke, or provoke, the kind of neurasthenic and emotionally unhinged behaviour fiercely displayed by the tortured, divided Dane prince.

As Eliot articulated in his famous, if controversial, essay, defining the concept of the "objective correlative", which he insisted is, "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art"  - a rather tellingly revealing declaration when one considers the rigidly reserved, repressed, and socially proper disposition Eliot painstakingly cultivated - he precisely describes it as being, "...a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of the particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked."    

So, the problem Eliot had with Shakespeare's apparent failure to evoke that "particular emotion" he was anticipating, was that the "external facts" throughout the course of the play that were given, via the absorbing, subtle act of "termination in sensory experience", proved incongruous with Hamlet's strange behaviour - the final analysis and judgement proclaimed it an "artistic failure". I think Eliot focused too much attention on the mother and not enough (in fact it was a plumb zero!) on the murdered father, and the theme of fatherhood, in general, infused within the play, significantly enough, given what must have been a personally difficult time for Eliot, having written his essay fairly soon after the death of his own father, whom he, again, had not reconciled with prior to "shuffling off this mortal coil".

Moreover, Eliot seemed to have missed the obversely parallel significance of the Polonius chartacter, whose scenes with his son, Laertes, and his manservant, Reynaldo, Eliot accuses of being completely insignificant and extraneous to the play; in fact he called them "unexplained scenes... for which there is little excuse." I find it very surprising not to notice the incredible irony and consequential hypocrisy found in Polonius' characteristically high-falutin and ostentatious speech to Laertes upon the latter's departure for France.

In the speech, Polonius, with fatally ironic foreshadowing, imparts upon Laertes to, "Give thy thoughts no tongue/ Nor any unproportioned thought his act." The first part of this sentence is amusing to us, because we soon learn that Polonius is quite unable to shut-up and refrain from subjecting others, particularly regarding Claudius and Gertrude, to his irrepressible opinions and inaccurate perceptions. And the second part of Polonius' phony advice to his unwitting son foretells of his own clumsy demise behind the Queen's arras from the undelayed blade of Hamlet's sword in Act 3, Scene 4.

Which brings me directly to my next citation in Polonius' ill-begotten speech, where he then warns Laertes, with almost comical irony, given the hasty, fatal beginning to the aforementioned act and scene: "Beware/ of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in,/ Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee./ Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;/ Take each man's censure. but reserve thy judgement." No doubt, Polonius did not "beware" of his deceptive "entrance to a quarrel" between Hamlet and the Queen, nor was he discerning enough when giving "few thy voice". In the end, Polonius' all too judgemental character got himself killed when he ignorantly meddled in Hamlet's volatile, personal affairs. He was a walking (and incessantly talking) contradiction in ironic reference to his own self-professed maxim: "To thine own self be true" - Pity, in the "pointy" end, that that should be Polonius' "rub".

Furthermore, I think it rather significant that Polonius was, in paternal, and tragic, fact, a father (to both Laertes and Ophelia), who was also killed, which exacerbated an already critical series of circumstances leading to the unabatingly tragic, bloody, and "no exit" style ending. As stated earlier, one of the play's major themes is that of "the father", and its symbolic significance of representing "grace" as opposed to the Queen who represents "nature". Eliot clearly had "father issues", as did Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses, who puts forth a very trenchant argument for an author's personal biography influencing his work and unconscious workings.

It's this very aspect of Hamlet that Eliot seems to have not understood, perhaps deliberately unconsciously, I suspect, thus provoking his negative opinion and concluding his essay with a rather telling, and ironic, insight: "We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluable puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii, 'Apologie de Raimond Sebond'. We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself." 

Eliot once said, allusively, that "'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know." Again, precisely, Shakespeare, and subsequently, the German playwrights that Walter Benjamin analysed, in his Origin of German Tragic Drama, felt something they could not articulate at the time of the historical disjointment in its proper "modern terms", and 300 years later neither could Eliot, ironically enough, but we - the "royal We", the present editorial - know more than Eliot now, because he is that which we know within a privileged historical context.