Abstract

T. S. Eliot’s declaration that “poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult” owes something to the experience of art the poet championed, one in which anxiety around poetry’s difficulty would be transformed into an “authentic” relationship between reader and text. This thesis argues Eliot’s pronouncement that poets should enact a difficulty of the most authentic order really means that poets should try to enact poems in the model of dynamic, informal speech between reader and text—something for which we might use “conversation” as a shorthand. At the same time, I also consider the way conversation is always a problem for poets, at least those working in the proto-professional literary landscape in which Eliot was invested, a time when critics were developing strict methods to judge poetry based on its properties rather than its effects. This is not just because the proto-professional poet’s formal expertise comes at the expense of their ability to engage in informal, affective speech, but also because to authentically represent such speech means to fail to do so, since success in conversation means ceding formal authority in favour of spontaneity itself. In linking developments in modern literary criticism to extraliterary forms of communication difficulty, I argue our contemporary obsession with difficult conversations speaks as much to a desire for “authentic relationships” as it does to an anxiety around the increasing professionalization of artmaking in industrial modernity, and the kinds of interpersonal communication it seems to foreclose.