Towards the end of his final Charles Eliot Norton lecture at Harvard on 31 March 1933, T. S. Eliot addressed “the vexed question of obscurity and unintelligibility,” identifying “several reasons” for difficulty in poetry that range from “personal causes which make it impossible for a poet to express himself in any but an obscure way” and “novelty,” to the nature of readers' expectations and the “difficulty caused by the author's having left out something which reader is used to finding” (689). The editors of the most recent volume of the ongoing edition of his Complete Prose, Ronald Schuchard and Jason Harding, suggest that these comments indicate how “stung” Eliot felt by “perplexed responses” to his meditative poem, Ash-Wednesday, after it was published in 1930 (xxix).
Eliot's correspondence in the fifth volume of John Haffenden's edition of his letters, provides some confirmation about his personal motives. Sending copies of...
