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PARTISAN REVIEW
performed the same ritual. Thus the "romantics" practiced an inhib–
ited and partial protestantism in poetry.
Not until Whitman was the individualist-protestant-poet really
emancipated from the iconography of rhetoric; not until his barbaric
yawp did the language of poetry become "functional" and entirely
"individual."
Nor has it indicated any return to poetic ritual. T. S. Eliot has
intimated that in religion the spirit killeth and the letter giveth life;
thus he rejects the extremes of liberal protestantism. Critically and
poetically he is, however, a liberal protestant, in spite of the fact that
his verses are weighted with references to tradition-"classical" is his
word. Poetically, a parallel to ritual is rhetoric. There is no reason,
of course, why an Anglo-Catholic in religion and a royalist in politics
should be a ritualist in poetry. Nevertheless Eliot's evident attempt
to stand upon something like consistency (because of his repudiation
of liberalism) ought to lead to something like ritual in poetic method.
But he disapproves of this ritual because it leads to what he calls the
interruption between the surface and the core of such poets as Milton.
An orthodox classicism will not object to this interruption, but instead
will assume that "substance" is distinguishable from "form." The
abiding classical conception is that of art as
techne,
a craft in dealing
with what is said. Dr. Johnson's belief that language is a "dress of
thought," Dryden's definition of true wit as a propriety of words and
thoughts, Quintilian's elaborate recipes for oratorical effect, and Aris–
totle's observation that the language of tragedy is "embellished"–
these are a legitimately classical or ritualist view of poetry. The oppos–
ing view, that language is integral with meaning, is anti-classical and
expressionist. Dr. Johnston's
Vanity of Human Wishes
is a monu–
mentally classical and rhetorical achievement, confined within the
limits of an iconography. Thus Eliot's profession of classicism is troub–
ling, in view of his remarks upon Milton. His proper trinity might
have been royalism in politics, Anglo-Catholicisllli in religion, and
"rhetoric"-a kind of liturgy-in poetry. A ritualist in religion and
politics should be the last to complain of the Miltonic ritual in poetry
or to observe that Milton's language is "artificial" and "conventional."
The protestantism of the protestant tradition in literary criticism does
not seem to have been attained until
I. A.
Richards' contention that
"form" in poetry cannot be considered apart from its "substance,"
that the "way" and the "whither" cannot be distinguished. Eliot's
