PARTISAN REVIEW
to
all
great poetry, an honesty which is to be found, Eliot says, in
Homer, Aeschylus, and Dante, and an honesty which is, he adds, in
a world too frightened to be honest, curiously terrifying, an honesty
against which the whole world conspires because it
is
unpleasant.
Here we can see how closely connected in Eliot's mind are the sense
of the actual and the ability of a poet to be honest.
Now let us take a negative instance, that of Swinburne. Swin–
burne for Eliot is a poet whose real virtue was his verbalism,
his
use
of words for their own sake. "In the verse of Swinburne the object
(or we might say the actual) has ceased to exist. . . . " Swinburne,
says Eliot, dwelt exclusively and consistently among words divorced
from any reference to objects and actualities, and this kind of poetry
is compared not only with that of Campion, which has both a beauty
of language and a reference to actuality, but also to "the language
which is more important to us .... the language which
is
struggling
to digest new objects ... new feelings, new aspects, as for instance
the prose of James Joyce and Joseph Conrad."
There is another important negative instance. Eliot speaks of
the images in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher as "cut and slightly
withered flowers stuck in the sand" in comparison with the images
of Shakespeare, Donne, Webster, and Middleton, which have, he
says, "tentacular roots" which reach down to "the deepest terrors
and desires." In the same way, Tennyson is praised for his great
technical skill but the quotations which Eliot cites, in 1936, when he
reverses his judgment of Tennyson are praised because they are de–
scriptions of a particular time and place. This could only be, Eliot
says, an English street.
*
Now, to return for a moment to my general subject, we can see
here the underlying unity which is involved in Eliot's revision of his
first evaluation of English poetry. For in praising Blake as one who
was unpleasantly honest and full of naked observations and insights,
Eliot said that such honesty could not exist apart from great technical
skill. In his first revaluation Eliot had praised Tennyson for his tech–
nical skill but dismissed
him
as one who merely ruminated. When
*
The Jines are:
126
He is not there; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly through the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
