556
PARTISAN REVIEW
SMALL LATIN BUT MORE GREEK?
THE SHAKESPEAREAN MOMENT lind Its Pillce in the Poetry of the
Seventeenth Century. By Plltrick Cruttwell. Columbill University Press.
$3".75.
This book is a contribution to the "What went wrong?" school
of discussion on seventeenth-century poetry. I found it stimulating,
scholarly, with a widely referential basis; not only in poetic quotation,
but in history and politics. But if one accepted Mr. Cruttwell's main
conclusions one would in practice be left feeling as hopeless about a
future for English poetry and, in particular, for a new age of poetic
drama, as literary books which deal with the scientific and rationalistic
developments of the seventeenth century generally intend to leave one.
Admittedly, Mr. Cruttwell is much more descriptive than theoretical
and
if
there is any ax-grinding, it is almost below the auditory threshold.
Not quite: there are vague noises, sometimes almost distinct, of "Anglo–
Catholic in religion, Royalist in politics, and Classical in literature" and
of "the split in sensibility," but the imputation of willfulness is refresh–
ingly absent.
If
Mr. Cruttwell detects a poetic decline since the days of
Shakespeare and Donne, and
if
he attributes it to causes which are not
dissimilar to those put forward by Mr. Eliot and others, he recognizes
the organic nature of the situation more clearly than they do and does
not toy with the idea that the poets ran out on the medieval structure
of religion and politics, like naughty boys, and ought now to be re–
turning from their prodigality.
But though his diagnosis and prognosis is thus less dilettante and
less based on nostalgia, it is perhaps even more radically pessimistic. His
strength lies in the fact that he concentrates on the actual poetic phe–
nomena which make the work of the Elizabethan dramatists and poets,
particularly Shakespeare and Donne, unique and startling: above all
their capacity for fusing widely discrepant elements and for informing
every particle of their poetic structure with dramatic dialectic. But it
is possible to see the
Elizabeth~n
poetic world after this fashion-as a
product of high improbability resulting from tensions and pressures which
are not likely to recur-without being certain of the entropy of the
poetic universe. Mr. Cleanth Brooks, for instance, thought that the po–
etic universe thus ran down after the seventeenth century: but he also
thought that it at least partially wound itself up again in the twen–
tieth. And this is interesting, because his analysis of the Elizabethan
type
of poetic intensity and profundity, its power of fusion of opposing ele–
ments, including the ugly and the satirical, its inherent dramatic irony
