PARTISAN REVIEW
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise,
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once we took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools' approval stings and honor stains.
It seems to me that the poet who wrote these lines cannot fail to
recognize at last both the spiritual grandeur of "Samson Agonistes"
and also the qmcern with speech, the effort to purify the dialect of
the tribe, and urge the mind to aftersight and foresight, which
is
characteristic of that great poem.
In thus supposing that Eliot's experience of the last decade will
lead
him
to a new recognition and admiration of Milton, it seems to
me that I am illustrating another aspect of the sense of the actual.
It
is
actuality itself, the actuality of middle age approaching old age,
which leads to a deeper understanding of Milton's major poetry, most
of which, after
all,
was written in middle or old age.
III
Let us return now to the other touchstones, or criteria, of poetic
genuineness.
Honesty
is
perhaps a shorthand term for a willingness to face
the reality of one's emotions. Thomas Middleton is given what seems
to me virtually fabulous praise by being said to have created in "The
Changeling," "an eternal tragedy, as permanent as Oedipus or
An–
thony .and Cleopatra ... the tragedy of the unmoral nature suddenly
trapped in the inexorable toils of morality.... A play which has a pro-
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