PARTISAN REVIEW
a dedicated,
self~conscious
literary artist who decided to write an
epic
poem
which would be like other epic poems and which would
be a national epic, it seems clear to me that the true comparison
would be to Virgil. How, then, are we to explain Eliot's dispraise of
Milton?
We have as possibilities
all
sorts of unconvincing explanations:
for example,
it
is said that Eliot depreciates Milton because Milton
was anti-authoritarian in religious matters, while Eliot himself is
nothing
if
not authoritarian,-an explanation which might be based
upon Eliot's remark that "Milton's celestial and infernal regions are
large but insufficiently furnished apartments, filled by heavy conver–
sation; and one remarks about the Puritan mythology its thinness."
But this is clearly not a sufficient explanation, since we know that
Ezra Pound expressed an equal dislike of Milton, and no one can
suppose that Ezra Pound's literary opinions were influenced by Anglo–
Catholicism.
Another possible explanation is that Milton is not the kind of
poet that Eliot himself desired to be, and there is, as everyone knows,
a natural tendency upon the part of a poet who writes criticism to
try to justify and praise in his criticism what he attempts to accom–
plish in his poetry. Thus Eliot criticizes Milton and reduces his im–
portance by saying that "the very greatest poets set you before real
men talking, carry you on in real events, moving." In the same essay
in which Eliot makes this remark he says, "There is a large class of
persons, including some who appear in print as critics, who regard
any censure upon a great poet as a breach of the peace, as an act of
wanton iconoclasm, or even hoodlumism. The kind of derogatory
criticism that I have to make upon Milton is not intended for such
persons, who cannot understand that it is more important, in some
vital respects, to be a good poet than to be a great poet." This sounds
to me as
if
Mr. Eliot were protesting far too much.
Milton is a crucial instance, because Milton is the one poet for
whom Eliot expresses a distaste in both his revaluations of English
poetry. Let us take the sentence I have just quoted. In the same essay
Eliot says, "It must be admitted that Milton is a very 'great' poet
indeed." We have then to determine,
if
we can, the difference between
being a "very great poet" and being "one of the very greatest," and
since Eliot puts the term "great" in quotation marks as
if
it were a
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