The essay we are
going to analyze is written by T. S. Eliot. It was originally composed as one
of a series of talks broadcast to Germany after the second World War.

It's a text
arranged into three paragraphs, each one having a different feature and
function.

It starts with a
statement which is the thesis that affirms English language to be the richest
of written poetry.

After that Eliot
gives qualifications of his statement because he doesn't want to be misunderstood.
He doesn't want to say that the greatest poets are English poets, nor he says
that England has produced the highest number of poems. But he confirms the
thesis that English language has some characteristics and features that make it
more suitable than other languages to compose poetry.

The first
explanation he provides explains why English language is the most suitable to
write poetry, because it is the language that  has got the largest vocabulary.

This is due to
the variety of elements that historically influenced English language. They are
many: the Germanic foundation; Scandinavian elements due to the Danish
conquest; the Norman French elements after the Norman conquest and followed by
a succession of French influences; some Latin words; finally the Celtic elements.

After writing
about the historical origins of the language, Eliot focuses on the rhythms, on
the music, that each of those languages brought. There are the Saxon verse, the
rhythm of Norman French and also the Welsh one and finally the influence of
Latin and Greek poetry.

Eliot makes a
restatement saying he doesn't praise English language just because it is his
own language but because it's a composite from many different sources.

This fact does
not mean that England produced the greatest poets, as Eliot states.

According to
Eliot there is the tendency to think that a language can excel only in a
particular art rather than another, for example Italy and France in painting,
Germany in music and England in poetry. However this is not true because art
has never been an exclusive possession of a single country, nor England has
always been the best country in poetry. For instance, the Romantic movement was
certainly the dominant cultural movement during the last years of the
eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. But later, French poets
such as Baudelaire and Valéry contributed in the developing not only of that
movement but also in the style of following authors and poets such as W. B.
Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Edgar Allan Poe and Eliot himself.

Moreover Eliot
says that, when a country dominates all others in a particular art, this does
not mean that the poets of that language are the greatest. We must consider all
the production of an artist and compare it with his contemporaries and with the
productions of foreign poets, for example between the production of Wordsworth
and Goethe's poetry and between Goethe's production and the poetry of his
contemporaries.

The comparison
among countries is very important to understand the cultural movements of an
age. In fact, the culture of each country has always been influenced by the
arts cultivated in the neighbouring countries. Poets' production all over Europe
is the result of a contamination of styles and ideas coming from the different
countries.

Eliot adds that European
literatures can renew themselves and be different from one another thanks to
two factors: the ability to receive and assimilate influences from the foreign counties
and the ability to learn from their own roots. In fact, each literature must
get in touch with other cultures in order to renew itself. But what is most
important is that each literature must find its sources in its history and tradition
but also in the common culture that all Europe shares.