Analysis of The Language for Poetry by T.S.Eliot

The text is an essay by the English poet T.S.Eliot, written as a talk broadcast and addressed to Germany after World War II. Anyway it’s quite evident the report is directed to a wider audience, not just to German people.

Tree long paragraphs consisting of statements, qualifications, clarifications, restatements, refutations and examples, introduced by logical connectors, make up the essay.   

The argumentation starting point is English language “has often been claimed” to be “the richest for the purposes of writing poetry”. The statement, immediately qualificated with the assumption that this primacy of English didn’t produce the greatest poets, seems to be a general opinion, but the author’s agreement is evident by use of personal pronoun “I”.

Writer's position is made clearer through explicit explanations and examples. The richness of English language is given by its largest vocabulary and its rhythmic variety, bore by other peoples over the centuries. Germanic, Scandinavian, Norman French, Latin elements extended its lexical aspect, while the metrical one had been enriched with early Saxon verse, Norman French, Welsh, Latin and Greek rhythm.

The second part links those examples and the first statement: English is the best language for poetry because of its complexity and its amount of linguistic sources. In this way the author gives evidence to its assumption’s rightness. He has now to explain why England hadn’t necessarily produced the greatest poets, despite the leadership of its language. A common belief is refuted: it’s not true peoples excel just in one art (e.g. Italy and France in painting, Germany in music, England in poetry).  Even England is considered producer of the best poetry during Romantic age, it has not the supremacy. Actually, for example, France in the second half of the nineteenth century had been the major influence and Germany had the best poet. In order to seem more concrete Elliot gives names: Baudelaire, Paul Valéry and, above all, Goethe, the “greater man”.

On the third part the writer develops the previous sections presenting real essay’s thesis. The key assumption is based on the importance of neighbouring countries for the nation culture and art growth. Elliot, using a metaphorical language, talks about a “tissue of influences woven to and fro”. Those influences consist on both literature from other countries and sources from the past (e.g. literature of Rome, Greece and Israel).