4
PARTISAN REVIEW
alike belong in a tradition that can be idJPtified as baroque. Eliot's
opposition between the "wit" and the "magniloquence" of the seven–
teenth century is misleading. Donne and Milton are but two mani–
festations of the mannerism that can likewise be seen in the painting
of Caravaggio, El Greco, the Poussins, or Rubens. In spite of notable
essays by Wolffiin, Fokker, and others, and the comments of Mario
Praz, Geoffrey Scott, Austin Warren, and Sacheverell Sitwell, sur–
prisingly little has been done to interpret the baroque, the complexity
of which seems not to be generally understood. What modern critics
of poetry, especially, have done is to isolate Donne and his "meta–
physical" behavior from the behavior of the body of the seventeenth–
century writers, painters, sculptors, and architects. We have talked
about only one seventeenth-century "manner" yet have presumed
that we are somehow attuned to that variously mannered century.
Thus our professed admiration of Donne is in a sense hollow and
affected, and our depreciation of Milton wilful. The fact
is
that
Milton is more characteristic of
his
century than Donne, and that
a defense of Milton can be extended to even other grounds than the
very good ones upon which Williams, Tillyard, and Lewis have built.
If
we understand the baroque, it is questionable tactic to elevate
Donne at the expense of Milton.
Our attraction to the "metaphysical" springs rather from our
own restless sensibility .than from any wide rapport with the seven–
teenth century, which is as often "mannered" in the flamboyant
and operatic way as it is "mannered" in the narrow intricacies
of Donne. Even the inward, overwrought "metaphysical" verse of
Donne differs from the "metaphysical" verse of T. S. Eliot, who
though he has a good many of the discords and instabilities of the
baroque, is nevertheless too diffident, too wistful, too pallid and spare
to have more than a similarity of certain poetic devices in common
with Donne. Eliot has none of the genuine "metaphysical" abandon–
he is too finicking, too tasteful. The
imp~veness
of Donne is what
so definitely marks him as baroque. In spite of
his
whimsical incon–
gruities-the evening "spread out against the sky/ Like a patient
etherised upon a table''- Eliot never commits himself to the delib–
erate extravagances of Donne, Crashaw, or even the pietistic George
Herbert. The Donne-like abandon is more apparent in Ransom or
Tate, although they too lack the authentic and shameless "conceit."
