T.
S. ELIOT
toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and
Tennyson and Browning ruminated." The poets prior to Dryden and
Milton, however, "are more mature .... and were better than later
poets of certainly not less literary ability."
By 1934 Eliot had fruitfully contradicted, modified or qualified
practically all the literary and critical judgments implicit in this
essay. He had praised not only Tennyson and Yeats, but also Words–
worth and Coleridge, who were more or less beyond the pale of
charity in 1921. In 1937, when questioned during a radio interview
on the British Broadcasting Company about what he regarded as
great poetry, he replied that Wordsworth's "Independence and Reso–
lution" and Coleridge's "Ode on Dejection" were probably "touch–
stones of greatness." This is a far cry from what Eliot said in 1922
and what has been echoed a countless number of times by critics
who have been influenced by Eliot.
And yet I do .not mean to imply in the least that Eliot is merely
contradictory. It is true that no one could have guessed, by reading
his essay on the "Metaphysical Poets" in 1922, that by 1937 he would
admire Wordsworth and Coleridge very much and cite them, rather
than Donne, as "touchstones of greatness." Nor could anyone have
guessed or suspected that he would praise Byron and Kipling, among
other unlikely possibilities. But on the other hand, there is a real
unity in back of all of these seemingly contradictory judgments. One
basis of this unity is the admiration for Dante which obviously began
when Eliot was still an undergraduate.
If
we understand Eliot's
gradual and profound re-reading of Dante, then we can see how at
one point, fascinated by one aspect of Dante, he would be likely to
salute Donne, while at a later stage it would be natural for him to
admire the characteristic directness and clarity of the poems by
Wordsworth and Coleridge which he cited as touchstones of what
is great in poetry.
If
we examine these poems carefully, we can see
that in the most direct way they resemble the very beginning of
The
Divine Comedy.
And here, too, we can find at least one explanation of the dis–
taste Eliot has expressed at various times for the poetry of Milton.
It was in 1933 here at Columbia that Eliot, by using what we may
call
the method of invidious comparison, compared Milton to Dante,
although the two poets are not really comparable. Since Milton was
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