Poetry: The Unappreciated Eliot

Abstract

Nobody appreciates George Eliot's poetry. Nowadays our failure to appreciate her poetry is precisely that: a failure to go so far as appreciate it, assess its worth, take its measure by taking our own stand for or against it and so declaring ourselves in the process. That the poems are so pedestrian may tempt us to overlook their real importance, an importance which, for the exceptionally forthright critic here quoted, inheres uniquely in the themes they treat. Reading her or any poet's verse as wrong-footed prose, means decreeing a pseudo equivalence between verse and prose that tilts the balance in prose's favor and handicaps verse just where it is strongest. A nuanced appraisal of Eliot's varying power in both literary media entails respecting the difference between them, which is to say, respecting verse's charter to embody thought and enact emotion within the language that makes it up.

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