PARTISAN REVIEW
IV
Eliot's theory of the nature and history of English poetry as
stated in this essay of 1921 can be summarized as follows: "The meta–
physical poets possessed a mind and sensibility which could devour
any
kind of experience." (Here, in passing, we may question whether
any poet can devour any or all kinds of experience, and further
whether such a poet as Wordsworth was not capable of taking hold
of certain kinds of experience which the metaphysical poets know
little or nothing about.)
Eliot continues by saying that Milton and Dryden were so pow–
erful-"performed certain poetic functions so magnificently that the
magnitude of the effect conceals the absence of others." The lan–
guage of poetry improved from that time forward, says Eliot, but
"the feeling became more crude." In the metaphysical poets and
their predecessors, "there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought,
or a recreation of thought into feeling," and there is also a kind of
intellectual wit, as Eliot observes in his companion essay on Andrew
Marvell. But in Collins, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson,
Browning, Hardy, Yeats, and practically every poet since the time of
Donne, there is missing that capacity of the mind, that wholeness of
sensibility which makes
it
possible to say of Donne that "a thought
was to him an experience," while Tennyson and Browning "merely
ruminated"-"they are poets and they think; but they do not feel
their thought as immediately as the odor of a rose." When Eliot adds
Hardy to this list because he was a modem Englishman and Yeats
because he was Irish, it seems to me that we may justifiably say that
seldom have so many poets been depreciated or dismissed in so few
pages. Yet, extreme and sectarian as this view is, it depends nonethe–
less upon a profound sense of the nature of poetry. We can see what
this sense comes to when Eliot says that "those critics who tell poets
to look into their hearts and write do not tell them to look deep
enough.... Racine and Donne looked into a great deal more than
the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system,
and the digestive tracts."
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