T.
S. ELIOT
Eliot came to revise
his
judgment of Tennyson
in
1936,
his
revision
was consequent upon a study of Tennyson's versification, which led
him to see how that poet's great technical skill did
in
fact, at times,
enable
him
to render the actual and not merely ruminate upon it.
Thus, in a sense, Eliot is consistent throughout; the reason that a
revision has been necessary is that Eliot was burdened by precon–
ceptions which belonged to the period in which he was writing, and
he had simply not read sufficiently in some of the poets he dismissed.
So too with the poetry of Milton, although I do not think that
here it
is
a question of insufficient reading. When Eliot says in depre–
ciation of some of Milton's poems that they are conventional, artificial,
and enamelled, he is complaining again about the absence of the
actual, as we see further in the same essay from which I have already
quoted: "That the greatest poets set you before real men talking,
carry you on in real events, moving." It seems to me likely enough
that by now Eliot has perceived beneath the perhaps artificial and
certainly grandiloquent surface of Milton's language precisely that
peculiar honesty about the essential strength or sickness of the human
soul, which he found in Dante, Shakespeare, Blake, and other of the
very
greatest poets. I should think that this desirable revision of
opinion may also have come about as a result of the development of
Eliot's own writing during recent years. When Eliot spoke of Milton
here at Columbia in 1933, he said that "Samson Agonistes" is not really
a dramatic poem but rather an extended lyric. In the "Four 'Quar–
tets,"
as I have already suggested, there are many indications that
the kind of experience Milton deals with in "Samson
Agonistes"~
Samson, shorn, blind and chained to the wheel, and Milton himself
blind and chained to old age-will be more understandable to the
poet
and critic who writes:
The poetry does not matter.
It was not to start again what one had expected,
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age?
And who writes later in the same group of poems:
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
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