2330 / T. S. ELIOT
Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language went on and in some respects improved; the best verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the Country Churchyard'' (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the Coy Mistress.
The second effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden followed from the first, and was therefore slow in manifestation. The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley's Triumph of Life, in the second Hyperion, there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated.
After this brief exposition of a theory?too brief, perhaps, to carry conviction? we may ask, what would have been the fate of the 'metaphysical' had the current of poetry descended in a direct line from them, as it descended in a direct line to them? They would not, certainly, be classified as metaphysical. The possible interests of a poet are unlimited; the more intelligent he is the better; the more intelligent he is the more likely that he will have interests: our only condition is that he turn them into poetry, and not merely meditate on them poetically. A philosophical theory which has entered into poetry is established, for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and its truth in another sense is proved. The poets in question have, like other poets, various faults. But they were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling. And this means both that they are more mature, and that they wear better, than later poets of certainly not less literary ability.
It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. (A brilliant and extreme statement of this view, with which it is not requisite to associate oneself, is that of M Jean Epstein, La Poesie d'aujourd'hui.7) Hence we get something which looks very much like the conceit?we get, in fact, a method curiously similar to that of the 'metaphysical poets', similar also in its use of obscure words and of simple phrasing.
O geraniums diaphanes, guerroyeurs sortileges, Sacrileges monomanes! Emhallages, devergondages, douches! O pressoirs Des vendanges des grands soirs! Layettes aux ahois, Thyrses au fond des hois! Transfusions, represailles,
6. I.e., 'An Elegy Written ill a Country Church- 7. Poetry of today (French), yard,' by Thomas Gray (1716?1771).
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THE METAPHYSICAL POETS / 233 1
Relevailles, compresses et Veternal potion,
Angelus! n'en pouvoir plus
De debacles nuptiales! de debacles nuptiales!8
The same poet could write also simply:
Elle est bien loin, elle pleure,
Le grand vent se lamente aussi . . . 9
Jules Laforgue, and Tristan Corbiere1 in many of his poems, are nearer to the 'school of Donne' than any modern English poet. But poets more classical than they have the same essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.
Pour I'enfant, amoureux de cartes et d'estampes, L'univers est egal a son vaste appetit. Ah, que le monde est grand a la clarte des lampes! Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit!2
In French literature the great master of the seventeenth century?Racine? and the great master of the nineteenth?Baudelaire?are in some ways more like each other than they are like anyone else. The greatest two masters of diction are also the greatest two psychologists, the most curious explorers of the soul. It is interesting to speculate whether it is not a misfortune that two of the greatest masters of diction in our language, Milton and Dryden, triumph with a dazzling disregard of the soul. If we continued to produce Miltons and Drydens it might not so much matter, but as things are it is a pity that English poetry has remained so incomplete. Those who object to the 'artificiality' of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to 'look into our hearts and write.'3 But that is not looking deep enough; Bacine or Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.
May we not conclude, then, that Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert and Lord Herbert, Marvell, King, Cowley at his best, are in the direct current of English poetry, and that their faults should be reprimanded by this standard rather than coddled by antiquarian affection? They have been enough praised in terms which are implicit limitations because they are 'metaphysical' or 'witty,' 'quaint' or 'obscure,' though at their best they have not these attributes more than other serious poets. On the other hand, we must not reject the criticism of Johnson (a dangerous person to disagree with) without having mastered it, without having assimilated the Johnsonian canons of taste. In reading the celebrated passage in his essay on Cowley we must remember that by wit he clearly means something more serious than we usually mean to-day; in his criticism of their versification we must remember in what a narrow discipline he was trained, but also how well trained; we must remember that
8. From Derniers Vers (Last Poems, 1890) 10, by a Dead Woman'): 'She is far away, she weeps / Jules Laforgue (1860-1887): 'O transparent The great wind mourns also.' geraniums, warrior incantations, / Monomaniac 1. French symbolist poet (1845-1875). sacrileges! / Packing materials, shamelessnesses, 2. From Charles Baudelaire's 'Le Voyage': 'For shower baths! O wine presses / Of great evening the child, in love with maps and prints, / The univintages! / Hard-pressed baby linen, /Thyrsis in the verse matches his vast appetite. / Ah, how big the depths of the woods! / Transfusions, reprisals, / world is by lamplight! How small the world is to Churchings, compresses, and the eternal potion, / the eyes of memory!' Angelus! no longer to be borne [are] / Catastrophic 3. An adaptation of the last line of the first sonnet marriages! catastrophic marriages!' of Astrophil and Stella, bv Sir Philip Sidnev (1 554? 9. From Derniers Vers 11, 'Sur une Defunte' ('On 1586).
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233 2 / {CATHERINE MANSFIELD
