PARTISAN REVIEW
to be in a prison, the prison of the self, hearing only aethereal rumors
of the external world. There are many other instances but perhaps
a quotation from the "Four Quartets" is the most explicit of
all:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years–
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of
l'entre deux guerres–
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and different kind of failure
Because one has only learned to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.
...
Perhaps I should say at this point that I have quoted so often from
the "Four Quartets" because they bear directly on Eliot's criticism,
and not because I admire them very much; they seem to me one of
his less successful works, although I confess that I have been unable
to find anyone to agree with me. The main point is that throughout
Eliot's criticism the quality of the poet's language and its effect upon
the future of the English language has always concerned Eliot very
much. I think we can say that never before has criticism been so
conscious of
all
that can happen to language, how easily it can be
debased, and how marvelously it can be elevated and made to illu–
minate the most difficult and delicate areas of experience.
VI
The fourth criterion is the dramatic sense, and Eliot maintains
that all great poetry is dramatic. However, there is perhaps some con–
fusion here, since Eliot means by dramatic the attitudes and emotions
of a human being in a given situation. But when he comes to apply
this broad definition, he is often influenced by his own love of Eliza–
bethan dranla, where the term, dramatic, narrows itself to the specific
theatrical sense of the word, a sense in which it must be distinguished
from meaning any human being's attitudes in any situation. This
shift in meaning makes it possible for Eliot to say that Milton is not
dramatic. For if we stick to the broad definition of the term, then,
obviously, what could be more dramatic than the attitudes of Lucifer
in "Paradise Lost," or the attitudes of Samson in "Samson Agonistes"?
Again, if we accept Eliot's broad definition, then perhaps we must
say that the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" is just as dramatic,
qua
132
