ABSTRACT
The effort is to dispense with that supernaturalism that habitually, in one form or another, accompanies Symbolist theory – Boehme and the correspondences, magic and mediumship, the sacramentalism of some Roman Catholic aestheticians, like Mr. David Jones. At the linguistic level Mr. Eliot has that precision of strange outline that all Symbolists require; nothing is more memorable in his verse than the immediate sense of exactness communicated, the impression of great resources of language delicately employed, and infinite flexibility of rhythm. If it were dead, my remarks on the place of the Image in our own time would of course have to be qualified. And by the time they have done that, the dissociation of sensibility, the great and in some ways noxious historical myth of Symbolism, will be forgotten, except by historians crying their new categories and still unheard persuasions.
