A raid on the inarticulate

For those of you who stayed behind today...here is the excerpt that I mentioned - and quoted badly from memory - from 'East Coker', the second of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle

With words and meanings.

'East Coker' was completed in or around 1940. It is a poem I return to again and again. Here is that quote about 'a raid on the inarticulate' in context. I think it is worth quoting this passage at length. The idea of 'the general mess of imprecision of feeling, / Undisciplined squads of emotion' seems to me to go straight back to Pound and Imagist theory (if not always Imagist practice).

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres*   Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

                          [* the two (world) wars]

Here is another, related passage, which comes a little earlier in the poem:

    You say I am repeating

Something I have said before. I shall say it again,

Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

  You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

  You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

  You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

  You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

At this point I should probably just send you to read the whole poem in all its weird glory. I'd be interested to know your thoughts.