PARTISAN REVIEW
cedented essays which were initially disguised as book reviews, re–
valuated the history of English poetry in one set of terms; between
1933 and 1946 he gradually reversed his whole evaluation, so that,
for example, Tennyson, whom he scorned in 1922, was the object
of serious and elevated commendation
in
1936. In the same way
Yeats, who in 1922 was said to be outside of the tradition of English
poetry merely because he was Irish, is praised in the highest terms
in 1933 as someone who "by a great triumph of development began
to write and is still writing some of the most beautiful poetry in the
language, some of the clearest, simplest, most direct." Some of the
poems that Eliot refers to were written long before 1922. Thus
it
is
almost possible to say of Eliot, "The dictator has abdicated. Long
live the dictator!" This is the only instance I know where anyone
has abdicated and immediately succeeded to his own throne.
We can take 1922 as the approximate beginning of the first
period, for in that year Eliot began to edit
The Criterion,
and "The
Waste Land" was published in the first number, although it was in
1921 that Eliot published the reviews in the
London Times Literary
Supplement
which were later collected as
Three Essays in Homage
to John Dryden.
In the most famous of these essays, "Metaphysical
Poets," Eliot declared that English poetry had not been the same since
the death of John Donne. Dryden was a good poet, and Milton was
a good poet, but their very virtues brought about a dissociation of
sensibility in their successors. Since the time of Donne, according to
this essay, there have been no poets in English who really enjoyed a
unity of sensibility. What Eliot means by "unity of sensibility," a
dubious psychological phrase, is difficult to make clear, but can
perhaps best be stated by paraphrasing Eliot's remark that Donne
felt
his
thoughts at the tips of
his
senses. All poets since Donne, with
a few exceptional moments of unity, have permitted their thoughts
and their emotions to be separated. "In the seventeenth centry," says
Eliot, "a dissociation of sensibility set in from which we have never
recovered; this dissociation was not natural and was aggravated by
the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden....
The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century and con–
tinued. Poets revolted against the ratiocinative; they thought and felt
by fits unbalanced.... In one or two passages of Shelley'S 'Triumph
of Life' and Keat's second 'Hyperion' there are traces of struggle
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