PARTISAN REVIEW
depths of being which could not be deliberately or consciously tapped.
And let us remember that Goethe and Arnold were in no sense ex–
ponents of surrealism.
If
we examine Eliot's scrutiny of English vs::rsification from the
time of Marlowe to the time of Hardy and Yeats, and are not seduced
into glib and futile logic-chopping, we come upon a theory of the
nature of versification which seems to do justice to the many different
things that Eliot has said about it. Namely, the theory that the essence
of metre and thus of versification is any repetitive pattern of words,
and the endless arguments about versification from Campion to Amy
Lowell and the Free Verse movement are caused by the curious
feeling that some
one
repetitive pattern, or kind of pattern, is the only
true method of versification.
It will doubtless have been obvious by now that in a summary
and incomplete way I have been attempting to make systematic the
work of a critic who far from proceeding in terms of system or of
a priori
conceptions or of philosophical theory as to the nature of
poetry has, on the contrary, developed the body of his work in the
course of writing book-reviews, and essays inspired by a particular
occasion. In fact, Eliot complains at one point that he often had to
write criticism when he wanted to write poetry, and it is certainly
true that he did not always choose the subjects of his criticism. Yet
it is likely that, to proceed in this way, at the mercy of accident, edi–
torial whim, and his own intuitive sense of what he really felt about
poetry, w.as probably the only way in which much of Eliot's criticism
could have come into being.
VII
Let me now try to place Eliot's criticism in terms of a classifica–
tion which was first suggested by the late Irving Babbitt, and I be–
lieve misused by him. Babbitt speaks of impressionistic criticism, sci–
entific criticism, neo-classic criticism, and a fourth kind to. which he
gives no name, except to quote Abraham Lincoln's epigram about
how you can't fool all the people all the time: a kind of criticism
which is sometimes called the test of time or the verdict of posterity.
This fourth kind presents many difficulties, including the fact that
the posterity of the past, the only posterity we know about, has
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