Phantoms of the Mind: T.S. Eliot's "To Walter De la Mere."

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At a time when "degrees of reality" engaged his studies, T. S. Eliot maintained that "The I who saw the ghost is not the I who had the attack of indigestion" (Knowledge and Experience 121). While this partly explains Eliot's familiar compounding of ghosts, it also suggests how an illusion prompts further, if more complicated, reflections on the allusion it makes. For the self that "sees" the ghost and the self that "suffers" indigestion are both yet distinct from the writer who alludes to them. An allusion for Eliot is by no means only an apparition of one text glimpsed in another, and a reader's customary nod upon its recognition. Rather, it doubles a reader's perspective by its very performance; that is, of reading and writing at once, of a poet's history of reading being shaped now by the process of his writing. Our memory of course helps make some ghostly demarcations of textual entries and exits, but a poem may be read by consulting its author's memory as it were. I have followed this method in reading Eliot's "To Walter de la Mare."

An occasional poem with a difference, "To Walter de la Mare" puts us unmistakably in the ambience of work of a poet whose seventy-fifth birthday occasions the tribute. Eliot salutes, in other words, not so much the poet as his "conscious art," "those deceptive cadences / Wherewith the common measure is refined" (lines 31, 29-30), "The inexplicable mystery of sound" his poems create (Eliot, Collected Poems 233). There is indeed a nice irony in Eliot's tribute to a poet whose Georgian clan he had once derided. "[T] he Georgians," demurred Eliot in 1918, "caress everything they touch" (qtd. in Robert H. Ross 181-82). Thirty years later, and within a decade of his own Practical Cats, Eliot finds it only proper that he make amends. He would …