THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
Some poetry, which I should have liked, actually repelled me:
Milton's
Allegro
and
ll
Penseroso,
Gray's
Elegy,
Wordsworth's
Ode
on the Intimations of Immortality,
Dryden's
Odes.
I think that what
repelled me about these wonderful achievements, was the sense in
each of them of poetry trying to become architecture: of the words
aspiring to a structure which often remains outside the poetry. I felt
that I had no entry into these great poetical constructions.
Yet these ideas of repulsion and uninterest were felt only as
defects of my own mind, they implied no judgment, no criticism.
Although I could begin to see that the wholly sentimental and the
incompetent were bad, beyond this my mind did not condemn. I
appreciated by a process of awareness which put me at the center of
a verbal excitement, I failed to appreciate when I had no awareness.
This awareness, although uncritical, could make distinctions and per–
ceive differences of quality, as though within my own mind, different
poetic experiences lay side by side acting upon each other, the good
implicitly burning out the bad. I read every poem in every book and
magazine that came my way, and when I came in contact with the
moderns, they acted almost chemically upon my passive awareness.
I remember the great impression which the quotations in a review
in
The Times Literary Supplement
of the poems by T. S. Eliot made
upon me, without my in the least knowing why I was being impressed.
A sensibility which was contemporary in me had been awakened
by a few lines, as though by the pressing of a button.
I liked much that was bad. The young accept the bad, not
through bad judgement, but through lack of judgement. They like
the good .as well as the bad, and they cannot distinguish between an
effect which a writer indicates that he
is
trying to make in his writing
and one which is actually made. Thus, although I was conscious of
the ravishing beauty of the poems of De la Mare, I thought his virtue
lay in a dreamlike atmosphere which he shared with other writers,
I did not understand that this very vagueness was produced by
effects controlled with as great precision as that with which a watch–
maker screws the jewels into a watch. I was deceived by the will to
make a thing of beauty which betrays itself in some poems by the
use in excess of words such as "beauty." I had only to read in one
of Mr. Masefield's poems that he worshipped beauty to
think
that
I was in the presence of the beautiful.
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