ABSTRACT
True to the reach of her own etymological history, Eliot's muse, knowing she is the source of both music and poetry, inspires him accordingly. Evidence for this inspiration is Eliot's intuitive understanding of the properties of music that suggested several analogs for the practice of his art. Eliot's "auditory imagination" comprehends the totality of a poem's sound and sense and has affinities with Pater's "imaginative reason," which also seeks to account for a poem's multiplicity of resonance. The ultimate verbal music, which becomes a metaphor for the Logos, "the totality of universal relationships," is also the music of Eliot's Four Quartets , albeit within a Christological teleology. Eliot's unheard music in "The Dry Salvages" has numerous implications for the process of art. First, music heard at the deepest level is unheard because the auditor and the music are one.
