Context
A eulogy for a reckless poet
Harry Crosby was an American poet, publisher (with his wife Caresse, of the Black Sun Press in Paris), and a fixture of the 1920s expatriate literary scene. He died in December 1929, in an apparent murder–suicide with his lover, at age 31. In 1930 Caresse Crosby asked T. S. Eliot — who had known the couple in Paris — to write a preface for a new edition of Harry’s collection Transit of Venus.
The preface is Eliot musing on poetic risk-taking: a poet who never over-reaches, he writes, “can go very far” only if willing to risk failure. The now-famous sentence appears near the end, as Eliot defends Crosby’s reach for a private symbolism: “Of course one can ‘go too far’ and except in directions in which we can go too far there is no interest in going at all; and only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out just how far one can go.”
and only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out just how far one can go
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Eliot himself was ambivalent about the piece: in a September 1931 letter to Caresse Crosby he called it dissatisfying, apologizing for its brevity and what he felt was its “poverty of ideas.” The book was published by the Black Sun Press in Paris in November 1931 in a limited edition.