Mysticism and Music

Abstract

‘[M]ystical illumination’, Eliot remarked in March 1933, ‘is a vision which may be accompanied by the realization that you will never be able to communicate it to anyone else, or even by the realization that when it is past you will not be able to recall it yourself.’¹ It is, in other words, an event of the spirit as deeply mysterious and elusive as it is real. But how then is it possible, one can ask, for a fully authentic mystic, or for someone graced by an experience of a mystical kind, to be also a great poet? Will he not tend to demean in some way and to betray the transcendent gift he has received by straining to express it in words? And on what basis in any case can he hope to give tongue to that which is in itself ineffable — particularly when, as it would appear, only a few broken fragments remain in his memory of the original experience?

… poetry so transparent that in reading it we are intent on what the poetry points at, and not on the poetry, this seems to me the thing to try for. To get beyond poetry, as Beethoven, in his last works, strove to get beyond music.

T. S. Eliot, ‘English Poets as Letter Writers’, (1933)