Eliot On Interpretation

      I wanted to get this down in this blog before I forget to write about it:

And Bradley's apothegm that 'metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct', applies as precisely to the interpretation of poetry.

To interpret, then, or to seek to pounce upon a secret, to elucidate the pattern and pluck out the mystery, of a poet's work, is 'no less an instinct'. Nor is the effort altogether vain; for as the study of philosophy, and indeed the surrendering ourselves, with adequate knowledge of other systems, to some system of our own or of someone else, is as needful part of a man's life as falling in love or making any contract, so it is necessary to surrender ourselves to some interpretation of the poetry we like. (In my own experience, a writer needs less to 'interpret' the work of some minor poet who has influenced him, and whom he has assimilated, than the work of those poets who are too big for anyone wholly to assimilate. But I dare say that if one was as great a poet as Shakespeare, and was also his 'spiritual heir', one would feel no need to interpret him; interpretation is necessary perhaps only in so far as one is passive, not creative, oneself.)

---[from T.S. Eliot's introduction to G. Wilson Knight's The Wheel of Fire]

Eventually I'll get around to arguing why Eliot here has his head firmly shoved into his ass ("cranial-glutimal ensconcement," as an old friend put it), and perhaps even why Eliot's own criticism betrays the propositions put forth here. But I really should get to other matters (i.e., ones for which I get paid).